* David Wheeler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2004-01-09 12:37]: > So, what do people like or prefer, and why?
I don't yet have any modules on CPAN (I do have an ID and plans for it), but I intend to handle this the way Andy does and I also prefer it as a user of modules when authors keep to that practice. It makes sense to distinguish between the versions of the parts of something, ie a distribution or project release, and the version of that something itself. Versioning systems do this as well, for good reasons. I can see an argument for having all files explicitly set to the same version, namely, that it's easy to track which version of the distro/release a particular part of it belongs to. There seems to be no reason that merits omitting or implictly setting the version, and plenty of reasons not to. Probably the best idea that would satisfy all requirements is to explicitly tag everything, or at least the submodules, with two different version numbers - one for their private version, one for the version of the distribution they're distributed with. Treatmennt of the latter is not absolutely obvious though, as it's a potential 1:n relation for all the parts of the distribution (even for the main module, in case of brownbag fixes in one of the submodules). And of course the obvious problem is that there's no established convention for the existence and naming of a distribution version tag. On the other hand, maybe we don't even need to establish such a convention. From the point of view of a program, the distribution version really doesn't matter; if the version of a submodule is important, then what the program is concerned with is having a certain version of that submodule available. Which distribution version it was packaged with is really less interesting. So a notice along the lines of "This file was packaged with the Foo-Bar-0.42 distribution" in the POD should suffice. I think that's my conclusion; version the submodules individually and have a notice in POD to reflect the version of the distribution they belong to. Thanks for the food for thought. :) I don't know if anyone will agree with my arguments, but I hadn't thought about this in detail before, and your question was a nice opportunity to mull over the issues. -- Regards, Aristotle "If you can't laugh at yourself, you don't take life seriously enough."
