[Bioperl-l] Bioperl versioning

[Sendu Bala]

Chris Fields wrote:
>> Dave Howorth wrote:
>>>>> That's the user point of view - how does the developer actually tell
>>>>> CPAN that something is a developer release so that normal users don't
>>>>> automatically install it?
>>>> I found this:
>>>> http://www.atrixnet.com/PM/So-You-Want-to-Contribute-to-The-CPAN.ppt
>>>>
>>>> Is says that $VERSION should simply be changed from a naked number into
>>>> a single quoted number and this should be recognized by the CPAN
>> indexer.
>>> <http://search.cpan.org/~nwclark/perl-
>> 5.8.8/pod/perlmodstyle.pod#Version_numbering>
>>
>> Thanks for that.
>>
>> I guess from that the 1.5.2 version number should be:
>>
>> $VERSION = 1.05_02
>>
>> And 1.6 would be
>>
>> $VERSION = 1.06
>>
>> But will this cause a problem wrt 1.4? 1.4 has:
>>
>> $VERSION = 1.4;
>>
>> Is 1.4 lower than 1.06? Should we keep to a single digit version, so
>> 1.5_02 and 1.6? Does this really not work with CPAN? Should we call them
>> version fifty and version sixty? 1.50_02, 1.60?
> 
> Doesn't perl 5.6.1 and up use the 'x.y.z' versioning syntax?  It would be
> much simpler to use that. 

That does not present us with a way to have 1.5.2 marked as a developer 
release in CPAN.

Also, see the discussion here: 
http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/require.html

Since we require 5.6.1 the backwards-compatible issues maybe don't apply 
to us, but do these ideas work with modules, or just Perl itself? Is 
CPAN et al. happy with this form of versioning?

/Something/ needs to be done about Bioperl versioning, because the 
current 1.4 or 1.5 is completely inadequate.