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PURL/VERS Specification News

Stay up to date with important news about the PURL and VERS specifications.

ISO starts work on Package-URL (PURL) specification​

Date: October 7, 2026

Details: ISO has assigned Draft International Standard number 27056 to the Package-URL (PURL) specification ECMA-427. Creating an ISO standard for PURL is proceeding under the ISO/IEC JTC 1 Joint Technical Committee.

ECMA-xxx-VERS 1st Edition approved by Ecma TC54​

Date: October 6, 2026

Details: Ecma Technical Commmittee TC54 approved the 1st Edition of the new VERS standard ECMA-xxx-VERS 1st Edition. This new edition is pending approval by the Ecma General Assembly in December. The ECMA standard number (ECMA-xxx) for VERS will be assigned after the GA approval.

The corresponding release in the vers-spec repository is v1.2.1.

ECMA-427 2nd Edition approved by Ecma TC54​

Date: October 6, 2026

Details: Ecma Technical Commmittee TC54 approved the PURL standard ECMA-427 2nd Edition. This new edition is pending approval by the Ecma General Assembly in December.

See the Release Notes for an overview of the changes.

The corresponding release in the purl-spec repository is v1.1.0.

PURL Test Schema v0.2​

Date: August 4, 2026

Details: We implemented a very important update to the PURL test schema - schemas/purl-test.schema-0.2.json. The key updates are:

  • Renamed the PURL test groups from 'base' and 'advanced' to 'required' and 'recommended' to make it more clear that a PURL implementation must pass the 'required' test cases to demonstrate conformance with the ECMA-427 standard. The 'recommended' test cases document common data patterns that need to be normalized for a PURL to conform to the standard.
  • Renamed the 'roundtrip' test type to 'validate'. The 'validate' test type will not require PURL input in canonical form. It is similar to the 'parse' test type except that the test case output is a canonical PURL string instead of an object containing decoded PURL components for the 'parse' test type. "Round-trip" tests are still recommended, but specific test cases are not needed because the premise of a round-trip test is that the output equals the input.
  • Renamed the test case property: expected_failure_reason to expected_message in order to expand the usage of this property to provide informational test messages beyond the reason for a test case failure.

The PURL team is planning major upgrades to the PURL test suite with this new data structure.

  • The test cases based on the schemas/purl-test.schema-0.1.json will remain available in the purl-spec/tests/ folder under the v1.0.1 release tag.
  • The PURL team is in the process of applying the purl-test.schema-0.2.json changes to all existing test case files. We will publish PURL Spec Release 1.1.0 after the test cases are updated to match the new schema.

VERS Spec Release v1.0.0​

Date: August 4, 2026

Details: Release v1.0.0 of the vers-spec is the first release for VERS.

PURL Spec Release v1.0.1​

Date: August 3, 2026

Details: Release v1.0.1 of the purl-spec project includes the registration of 7 new PURL types:

  • brew: for Homebrew for macOS and Linux
  • chrome-extension: for Chrome browser extensions
  • opam: for the OCaml package manager
  • otp: for BEAM/OTP applications written in Elixir, Erlang, Gleam or other BEAM languages
  • vcpkg: for the vcpkg C/C++ package manager.
  • vscode-extension: for VS Code extension packages
  • yocto: for Yocto project recipes

and an important change to the 'cpan' PURL type to make the namespace PURL component optional.