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Postings from September 2011
On Wed, Sep 07, 2011 at 06:57:14AM -0400, John Peacock wrote: > On 09/06/2011 01:14 PM, David E. Wheeler wrote: > >> *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. > > version.pm is a pseudo-pragma. The whole point of the CPAN release was > to make _any_ Perl act the same way regarding version comparisons. > There is no way to make that happen without having a version-object > aware UNIVERSAL::VERSION, which is why version.pm has exactly the same > code as exists in the Perl core... Yes, this is accurate, but missing the complaint: A *different* version of the Perl core. The CPAN release contains the current Perl core semantics. That's good. But what this means is that on any *previous* major release, any module can load version.pm and as a side effect change core semantics everywhere. Effectively, loading version.pm behaves like upgrading perl to a different major version. At runtime. From any module's code. I don't have a solution to that. But that's the concern. Legitimate in my opinion. Nicholas Clark