[Bioperl-l] Bioperl versioning

[Sendu Bala]

Nathan Haigh wrote:
> Sendu Bala wrote:
>
>> That all sounds good to me, except I worry about potential confusion if 
>> people look manually at the things available in CPAN, see 1.60_02 and 
>> think it is more recent than 1.60 and try to install it manually.
> 
> I not sure if this would be a problem. As far as I understand, CPAN
> treats these packages with underscores in $VERSION as something
> distinctly different to the others releases (i.e. developer releases).
> If you look at such a page, it is clearly evident that it is a
> developers release. For example, if you search on CPAN for the latest
> version of the CPAN module is shows 1.8802. if you go to that page:
> http://search.cpan.org/~andk/CPAN-1.8802/
> There is also a link for the latest developer release, released 1 day
> after 1.8802 with a version of 1.88_57 (which would convert to 1.8857).

[snip]

>> Since
>> $VERSION = 1.52_10;
>> is evaluated to 1.5210, by analogy if 1.60_02 was RC2 before release, 
>> final release version should be
>> $VERSION = 1.6010.
>
> Because they are dealt with separately, I don't think this is an issue
> (see above).

If you don't notice the dates, or are doing numerical version number 
comparisons, 1.6002 (an RC) is greater than 1.60 (the release). It may 
not be automatic, but you can still chose to download the developer 
releases. Which means if we say to someone 'use Bioperl 1.6 or better' 
they may choose to get the latest version and think it is 1.6002 when 
infact 1.60 was the more recent version. 1.6010 solves the problem, is 
consistent with your 1.50_10 suggestion, and doesn't cause any problems 
as far as I can see.


>>> If we are going ahead with the new $VERSION scheme (as it currently is
>>> in HEAD), we should, for the sake of clarity,  try to talk about Bioperl
>>> 1.52 instead of Bioperl 1.5.2 and make an effort to sync the
>>> documentation with regards to this.
>>>     
>> I might disagree with this though. I think perl people, and perhaps unix 
>> people in general, should be used to version numbers like '1.5.2', but 
>> then getting '1.52' from the code since such a number allows simple 
>> numerical comparisons while the former does not. The former is easier to 
>> read and understand. This is just how Perl itself behaves.
>>
>> Most users who wouldn't expect such a behaviour aren't going to be 
>> checking the version number programatically anyway.
>>
>>
>> BTW. do we have someone with a CPAN account, or should I get one?
>>   
> 
> It says Ewan Birney is the author of Bioperl - I assume it must be
> possible to have multiple people have the permissions to update a single
> package.

How did you get Bundle::BioPerl updated? Did you just ask Chris 
Dagdigian to do it for you? Or do you have access to his account? I'll 
ask Ewan about it.