# from John M. Gamble
# on Thursday 23 April 2009 12:47:
>we should be aiming for:
>
>1) there is one, and only one, format for a version number in META.yml.
>2) CPAN packages are named using that number in META.yml. See above.
...and everyone who uses float versions will now scream bloody murder.
>3) conversion between the source code's version number format and
>META.yml's format is where all the arguing goes for the perl users
Arguing on this point is not allowed in this century due to historical
accidents and compatibility constraints.
>"it's obvious" conversion of a floating point version to tuple wasn't
>obvious to me, because that's not how I do it in my own mind.
>To me, an X.YY version number goes to X.YY.00, and that's how I've been
>numbering them.
It has never been obvious that the conversion is 3-column based. I
think it should have been 1-column based -- which is about the closest
to obvious you can get.
>Anyway, are 1) and 2) reasonable goals? It would at least spare the
>outside world the intricacies of the inner world of perl.
It would be nice, but has thus-far been met with much complaining.
Would it be so painful had the conversion been 1-column based? We may
never know.
I think your options are:
1) tidy implementation, everything is a 3-column based tuple,
lots of complaining, possibly mass confusion
2) messy implementation, floats are floats, tuples are 3-column based
(don't forget to pad with enough zeroes!, watch out for
underscores, etc),
lots of complaining, mass confusion
(what we currently have, but with documentation)
3) Unicorns and time machines, tuples are 1-column based,
no need to explain zero-padding,
ok(v5.6.2 gt v5.0.0.5.0.3),
everything is a tuple, everyone is happy
I would like to see #3, and I suspect that it could be implemented in
5.12.0, excepting certain caveats for last-century compatibility, but
maybe if it changes now, it could make some sense in 9 more years.
--Eric
--
perl -e 'srand; print join(" ",sort({rand() < 0.5}
qw(sometimes it is important to be consistent)));'
---------------------------------------------------
http://scratchcomputing.com
---------------------------------------------------
