The Buffrs Book

Editions

Editions of buffrs mark a specific evolutionary state of the Proto.toml manifest format. The edition system exists to allow for format evolution while maintaining backward compatibility with existing packages.

Editions can be either explicitly stated in the Proto.toml or are automatically inlined once a package is created using buffrs. This ensures that you dont need to care about them as a user but get the benefits.

Note: The proto.toml edition is independent of the buffrs crate version. The edition only changes when the Proto.toml format itself changes. If you release a package with an edition that is incompatible with another one (e.g. if 0.7 is incompatible with 0.8) you will need to re-release the package for the new edition (by bumping the version, or overriding the existing package) to regain compatibility.

You may see errors like this if you try to consume (or work on) a package of another edition.

Error:   × could not deserialize Proto.toml
  ╰─▶ TOML parse error at line 1, column 1
        |
      1 | edition = "0.7"
        | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
      unsupported manifest edition, supported editions of 1.0.0 are: 0.50

Edition Compatibility

Buffrs 1.0.0 supports the following editions:

Current Edition

edition = "0.50"

The proto.toml edition is independent of the buffrs program version. Edition 0.50 introduces multi-version dependencies in buffrs 1.0.0.

Buffrs 1.0.0 Features

Buffrs 1.0.0 introduces:

• Per-dependency multi-version support: Use resolver = "multiversion" to allow multiple versions of the same package
• Namespace overlap policies: Control how proto namespace collisions are handled with namespace_overlap
• Version-qualified vendor directories: Multi-version packages use name@version/ directory format

See Multi-Version Dependencies for details.