Front page | perl.perl5.porters |
Postings from September 2011
On Sep 5, 2011, at 12:35 PM, David Golden wrote: > Excerpt from <http://www.dagolden.com/index.php/369/version-numbers-should-be-boring/>: > > $ perl5.8.8 -e '$VERSION=v120.100.103; print main->VERSION' > xdg > > $ perl5.10.0 -e '$version=v120.100.103; print main->version' > v120.100.103 Gotta admit that the 5.10.0 behavior feels much saner to me. > [...] > > $ perl5.8.8 -Mversion -e '$VERSION=v120.100.103; print main->VERSION' > v120.100.103 > > Think about the implications of that for a module called 'Foo'. Even if > Foo doesn't use version.pm, if version.pm is loaded anywhere then > Foo->VERSION acts differently and gives a different value than is in > $Foo::VERSION. > > *Any* code written expecting the 5.8.8 behavior of ->VERSION breaks in > 5.10.0 or even in 5.8.8 if version.pm (prior to 0.92) is loaded by > *any* module. Yeah, that's clearly wrong. version.pm should not change global behavior like that. UNIVERSAL::VERSION should do its own thing IMNSHO. > Sure, knowing all this, *you* could now choose to fetch $Foo::VERSION > or Foo->VERSION, but prior to Perl 5.10.0, no one thought they did > anything different, so I don't think it's a good idea to impose new > semantics on old code simply for the convenience of today's coder, and > certainly not without the deprecation cycle provided for in > perlpolicy. > > I agree that it's a sorry state of affairs, but on this issue, I'm > (perhaps shockingly?) in the do-no-harm backward compatibility camp. But how much has it been complained about, really? I mean the change in behavior of UNIVERSAL::VERSION, not version.pm injecting global behavior, of course. It has been almost 3 years since 5.10.0 dropped. Best, DavidThread Previous | Thread Next