I'm already on record on not supporting anything older than 5.10.1*. But
the reason I mentioned the META.* files is because I would think (well,
hope) that that in itself should be enough to prevent older Perls from
even looking at the package**.
Therefore, if the package isn't ever downloaded by these older Perls, the
'use' statement can use the all-integer format without problem. In theory.
-john
---
* In two or three years I'll be changing that to 5.16.1.
** People who deliberately override that restriction aren't part of this
conversation.
On Tue, April 16, 2019 2:59 pm, Dan Book wrote:
> It depends entirely what Perls you want to support. If you only want to
> support Perl 5.10 or newer, module versions in the dotted-decimal form are
> fine as long as you always declare them as strings and don't use
> underscores. If you want to support older than that, you have to jump
> through some hoops or risk users getting the wrong behavior.
>
> For the 'use X' statement itself for declaring a minimum perl version of a
> file, the '5.XXXYYY' format is still (always?) recommended, because it
> will
> make sure that running it on older Perls will result in a sensible error
> message.
>
> -Dan
>
> On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 3:54 PM John M. Gamble <jgam...@ripco.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, April 15, 2019 12:46 pm, David Cantrell wrote:
>> > On Mon, Apr 15, 2019 at 12:04:24PM -0400, Dan Book wrote:
>> >
>> >> As a side note, remember that the X.Y.Z form of versions (with more
>> than
>> >> one decimal point) is a sequence of integers ...
>> >
>> > Sadly it's worse than that.
>> >
>> > There exists popular software management software out there written by
>> > idiots who think that 3.0014 > 3.1, so that rule applies even when
>> > you're using numbers in the form X.Y with a single decimal point.
>> Those
>> > people did a lot of hard work to break numeric comparisons, one of the
>> > few things that computers are any good at.
>>
>> Are we at the point where there is no reason to not use X.Y.Z? I recall
>> (I
>> think) the historical reasons for using the 5.00y00z format, but given
>> that minimum Perl versions are now specified in META.* files, surely
>> there's no real reason to keep doing that anymore?
>>
>> I say this while looking at all my modules, which still use the fraction
>> format.
>>
>> -john
>>
>
