[Bioperl-l] StandAloneFasta::version

[Nathan Haigh]

Sendu Bala wrote:
> Nathan S. Haigh wrote:
>> I agree, I was going to update the tests later this morning :-P  Any
>> thoughts about version() or should I just leave it be for now?
>
> If its no trouble, go ahead with a version() method. Its nice to have
> in any case. I'd suggest your latter option of 'there be a function
> that does a compare internally so it can be accessed something like:
> print "we have met the min version requirement\n" if
> $factory->at_least_version('3.4t26');'
> In fact, it ought to work with '34t26b3' as well (I guess the method
> would try what it was given, and on failure, try again with the last 2
> characters removed, then try both cases again with a decimal added if
> there wasn't one).
I've contacted Bill Pearson to clarify his versioning scheme. Ideally,
we could do as you say, compare variants of '34t26b3'. However, the
software doesn't report the b3 part of the version string only 3.4t26
followed by a date. Therefore, I'm not sure it's possible to distinguish
between 3.4t26b1 and 3.4t26b3 - unless we consider the date also
returned by the software :-( .

Bill said he is currently busy with a course at Cold Spring Harbor but
will respond in full later. Therefore, until he's informed me of how he
versions his releases, I'll hold off with the version() method for the
time being.

Nath