Re: META.yml Update Proposal

On Saturday, December 6, 2003, at 07:57  AM, Randy W. Sims wrote:

> On 12/4/2003 3:03 PM, Thomas Klausner wrote:
>> Hi!
>> On Thu, Dec 04, 2003 at 01:53:33PM -0500, Randy W. Sims wrote:
>>> Thanks. I've already posted my final proposal to the Module-Build 
>>> list <http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=6578408> 
>>> for Ken
>> I'm not on the Module::Build list so I missed the discussion up so 
>> far, but
>> I find one important thing missing from your specification:
>> There should be a field in META.yml that specifies which version of 
>> the
>> META.yml-spec the file adheres to.
>> While it might be possible to deduce this from the value of 
>> 'generated_by',
>> I think it's easier for humans and parsers if there is a dedicated 
>> field.
>
> Perhaps something like:
>
> =head2 meta-spec
>
> Example:
>
>   meta-spec: <http://module-build.sourceforge.net/META-spec.html> - 
> v1.1
>
> (Spec 1.1) [required] This field indicates the location of the version
> of the F<META.yml> document specification being used along with the 
> version number.

At the London CPLAN meeting, we discussed making (and I volunteered to 
write...) a perl module that would "implement" the META.yml 
specification.  The idea is that it would parse the file and enforce 
the definitions laid out in [its version of] the specification.

We also talked about making it able to understand older versions of the 
spec, so you could say something like "parse this as a version-1.7 spec 
META.yml", but now I don't think that's necessary - every change we 
make to META.yml should always be 100% backward compatible, so future 
versions of such a module should be able to parse any current META.yml 
files.

So, given this, we could perhaps just use something like this (but with 
a MUCH better name than Module::MetaSpec) :

   meta-spec:
     module: Module::MetaSpec
     version: 1.1

  -Ken