[Bioperl-l] Bioperl versioning

[Nathan S. Haigh]

Sendu Bala 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?
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>   
I believe the link to the documentation above describes a common CPAN
versioning scheme as follows:

1.00, 1.10, 1.11, 1.20, 1.30, 1.31, 1.32

Therefore version 1.5 of Bioperl would be: 1.50 and version 1.5.2 would
be better as 1.52. Then to indicate that the 1.5 series is a developer
release, you append the underscore and at least 2 digits. Thus resulting
in the following: Bioperl 1.5 would be 1.50_01 and 1.5.2 would be
1.52_01. The only thing i'm unsure about would be when does the _01 get
incremented? I suspect we would probably not increment this number since
each release would be an increment of the minor release number e.g.
1.52_01, 1.53_01, 1.54_01 etc.

Although I'm still not sure how this versioning would affect bioperl 1.4
since 1.4 uses a non-standard versioning scheme :o(

As I understand it, the versioning of the Perl releases uses the x.y.z
scheme. But apparently CPAN modules should use the above versioning scheme.

Nath