§5 Profile and tooling versioning

The conformance profile (packages/ver-validator/) carries its own identifier, vera-profile/1.0, reported in every validation report. It is versioned independently of the standard because it enforces both normative requirements and a small set of profile-strictness rules that exceed VER 1.0.

Two stability guarantees hold, per ADR-0003:

1. Error codes are never renumbered or reused. A retired code is retired, not recycled. VER1303 is reserved and deliberately never emitted.
2. A code's severity may tighten only at a profile minor version, and only when the underlying requirement has itself become normative *for the records the code judges*. ADR-0006 is the worked example and the boundary case: it resolved to mandatory, but only for records declaring ver_version: "1.1". VER1002 judges 1.0.x records, where the requirement did not become normative, so it keeps its code and its warning severity in perpetuity. The 1.1 requirement is a schema error plus new profile codes — not a severity change to an existing one.

The --schema flag selects which published schema a record is validated against. The profile can validate 1.0.0 records under the 1.0.0 schema forever; freezing a release does not retire tooling support for it.