[Pdx-pm] The CPAN indexer and $VERSION

[Michael G Schwern]

Over on perl-qa at perl.org there was a long discussion on how to get the
version of a module.  Since we had all that discussion about module
versioning at the last meeting, folks might be interested to know that
the CPAN indexer now prefers to get its versioning information from
the META.yml file before grubbing its way through the code.  Here's
the tail end of that discussion.
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.qa/6439

This means that if you spit out a decent META.yml file you don't have
to worry about convoluting your $VERSION declaration to match what
CPAN likes.  You just have to worry about MakeMaker or Module::Build,
whichever you're using.

Module::Build produces a complete META.yml with version information
for the entire distribution (the version field) as well as each
individual file (provides).
http://search.cpan.org/src/KWILLIAMS/Module-Build-0.2801/META.yml
MakeMaker just does it for the distrubtion.
http://search.cpan.org/src/MSCHWERN/ExtUtils-MakeMaker-6.30/META.yml