CPAN recognizes "_" in the version variable as indicating a development version. This is easy if you're only releasing regular floating point versions i.e. "2.2" becomes "2.2_01".
Does this work? I'm not clear on the validity of _ with 2 decimal versions. our $VERSION = '2.2.1_01'; On Aug 4, 2010, at 3:21 PM, David Golden wrote: > On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 4:12 PM, Guillaume Cottenceau <gcott...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> Hum. This is for an application (a game), not a module, and I want it >> to be clearly labelled as a beta release. So fine with "There are no >> standard conventions for alphanumerics, and you just make life hard >> for the machines, which means no help for the humans." but I don't see >> the big problem for machines and I don't know how to say "hey this is >> beta" only with numbers; especially if "5.005_03 is equivalent to >> 5.5.30", I don't see how this could be considered to mark it beta/dev >> :/ >> >> Thanks for your help.. > > Let me try to clarify. For a given Perl module called "Foo", the > "$Foo::VERSION" variable defines the version number that the perl > interpreter will use to check against a minimum required version: > > use Foo 1.02; > > You can't put alphanumerics in $Foo::VERSION and have things behave nicely. > > However, a "distribution" -- by which I mean a tarball containing Perl > modules, can have any name/number you want.. By convention, it should > follow the same rules as for Perl module numbers, but it doesn't have > to. The big downside to alphanumerics is that various CPAN ecosystem > tools may not know how to interpret it as a "number". > > If you don't plan on releasing this to CPAN, then you don't have to > worry about it. If you do, then you should be aware of the > conventions. They evolved organically over time, if that helps > explain why things are the way they are. > > -- David Todd Rinaldo to...@cpanel.net