SPUG: version numbers and MakeMaker

David Dyck david.dyck at fluke.com
Sat Jan 31 10:29:19 PST 2009


Tye,

On Fri, 30 Jan 2009 at 21:07 -0800, tyemq at ... wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 2:58 PM, Ryan Corder <ryanc at greengrey.org> wrote:
>> Damian Conway goes into detail on why you need to do it this way and why it
>> needs to be on one line in chapter 17 of /Perl Best Practices/.  I just read
>> the chapter last night, otherwise I wouldn't be replying to this thread :)
>
> It takes a special level of hubris to write a brand new module and
> simultaneously loudly declare it to be a 'best practice'. But Damian
> has that level of hubris.  And several of these modules that he produced
> along with that book have already become official deprecated.

My understanding of hubris came from the perl manual
So I've often assumed that the actual definition was
the second entry in the Perl Glossary definition of hubris

   perldoc perlglossary

      hubris
          Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for.
          Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain)
          programs that other people won't want to say bad things
          about.  Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer.
          See also "laziness" and "impatience".

You've helped me broaden my understanding, thanks.
  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris>

> One shouldn't be surprised that Perl Best Practices doesn't mention
> the problems with version.pm, since version.pm didn't exist before the
> book was written (which is exactly why one shouldn't declare a "best
> practice" until enough time and usage has passed for the problems with
> it to become apparent).

According to http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596001735/
the book came out in 2005, but version.pm Changes file
has history back to Fri, 13 Sep 2002.

>From the earlier statement, and this one, I initially thought that you
were saying that Damian was the author of version.pm, but credit should
be given to John Peacock, right?.
  (oh <http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/> doesn't take credit vor version.pm either)
   ....


The perl core still contains v-strings, which are handy for many things,
but if you dig you can find that it warns that
     v-string in use/require is non-portable,
and in perldoc perldata there is the warning
     Note: Version Strings (v-strings) have been deprecated. They will be
     removed in some future release after Perl 5.8.1. The marginal benefits of
     v-strings were greatly outweighed by the potential for Surprise and
     Confusion.

David


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