[Bioperl-l] Global version number for all bioperl modules

[Heikki Lehvaslaiho]

Dear All,

One of the headaches we've had in the past with bioperl releases is that
CPAN, despite all our efforts, seems to pick up the representative
module for the bioperl CPAN bundle more or less randomly and therefore
the version numbers seem to jump up and down. (If you have bioperl
installed, go into cpan shell and press 'r' to see upgrade
recommendations, and you'll see what I mean).

The solution is to have one centrally controlled version number for all
bioperl modules, provided by Aaron Mackey in March in the form of
Bio::Root::Version:

http://bioperl.org/pipermail/bioperl-l/2003-March/011527.html

There are quite a number of modules (164 in core+run to be exact) that
set $VERSION so that it overwrites the global value. I do not think
there is any advantage to that. They are commonly set at 0.1 and never
changed again. Unless someone feels very strongly against that  I am
going to remove them all. 

In the rare cases where the module does not inherit from
Bio::Root::RootI, I'll add it.

If you need to keep track of CVS or other version numbers, I suggest you
use variable $Revision. You can use either of the code examples below:

use vars qw(@ISA $VERSION $Revision);
BEGIN { 
  $VERSION = do { my @r = (q$Revision: 1.8 $ =~ /\d+/g); 
         sprintf "%d.%-02d", @r };
  $Revision = q$Id: Biblio.pm,v 1.8 2003/05/17 19:03:52 heikki Exp $;
}
(This is from current Bio::Biblio, I'll remove the $VERSION )


	-Heikki
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      _/      _/                      http://www.ebi.ac.uk/mutations/
     _/  _/  _/  Heikki Lehvaslaiho    heikki_at_ebi ac uk
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