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Postings from April 2007
A few days ago I reported the following findings[0] to the author of HTML::Template::Compiled and I must admit I felt a bit silly when I wrote this: Bleadperl has a new version.pm that appends gratuitous zeros to versions for whatever reason. Nobody seems to object, so it's likely to stay that way. We have the case of an author writing the $VERSION twice, once in code, once in POD, and checking in a test if the value of XXX->VERSION is indeed the same as the string found in the POD. The check is done with a regexp and not with "==" and so fails with bleadperl. Compareable but not identical to the snippet % perl -le ' $VERSION = "0.84"; my $v = main->VERSION; print $VERSION =~ /\Q$v/ ? "OK" : "NOT OK"; ' NOT OK I know since a very long time that version.pm does that and I know it is documented in the manpage. And I did not complain ever because I thought that might just need a short time of education to get people used to it. The question I want to ask today is: does really everybody feel comfortable with the decision to do the stringification with trailing zeroes? Are there any arguments in favor of it? I fear we will regret the decision after 5.10 is out unless we have a really good reason for it. IMHO, the manpage needs at least a bit of an argument why these trailing zeroes are appended. -- andreas [0] http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers/2007/04/msg454837.htmlThread Next