Re: version-0.77 and You

On Jul 16, 2009, at 1:06 , John Peacock wrote:

> Gisle Aas wrote:
>> I think the term "dotted-decimal" is pretty confusing, especially  
>> when
>> what you contrast that with is "decimal version numbers" (which  
>> includes
>> a dot).  I suggest you call it "integers separated by dots" or
>> "dotted-integers" for short.
>
> They used to be fevered to as "numeric" and "extended" versions; I  
> think
> the decimal and dotted-decimal are a vast improvement (thanks David!).
> I don't think "dotted-integer" is quite as good, if only because it  
> has
> no poetic flow.

But "dotted-decimal" is just wrong.  If I take the decimal "1.04" and  
the
decimal "1.10" and dot them I get "1.04.1.10" and that's not what you  
meant.

>
>> In the section about declaring versions in the traditional way (using
>> decimal $VERSION) I suggest it's presented in the string form:
>>
>>   our $VERSION = "1.02";
>>
>> This is the recommended form as you don't get surprises when the  
>> version
>> number turns into "1.10".
>
> Except that form (quoted) is wrong.  There is still code that assumes
> that $VERSION contains a number, not a string, and will barf.

What code is that?  I've never encountered any problems with this and  
have
had trouble enough with non-stringified numbers as $VERSION.  I  
certainly
intend to continue to quote the version numbers of all my modules.

Just look at the modules in the perl distribution.  Almost all of them  
use
quoted numbers as their $VERSION.  So you propose that all those  
should drop
the quotes around their version numbers?

--Gisle