I just took over one of my older module suites (NetApp.pm, which is actually about 20 distinct NetApp::* classes), and decided to change the versioning scheme to match the style I'm using in all the rest of my code. In the older release, which was written back in 2008, I used a per-file SVN Revision tag as the VERSION, which led to per-module versions in the 100s. The version of the distribution was 1.1.2, and I had been using v-strings for versions back in those days.
In all my newer code, I dropped the individual module versions, and I use a single VERSION for the entire distro. I updated the distro version to 2.002, but PAUSE did NOT like this file when I uploaded it, because all of the individual module versions appeared to decrease, not increase. Now, the 02packages.txt.gz data shows the problem: NetApp 2.002 W/WP/WPMOORE/NetApp-2.002.tar.gz NetApp::Aggregate 332.000000 W/WP/WPMOORE/NetApp-1.1.2.tgz NetApp::Aggregate::Plex 203.000000 W/WP/WPMOORE/NetApp-1.1.2.tgz NetApp::Aggregate::RAIDGroup 203.000000 W/WP/WPMOORE/NetApp-1.1.2.tgz NetApp::Filer 410.000000 W/WP/WPMOORE/NetApp-1.1.2.tgz NetApp::Filer::Export 203.000000 W/WP/WPMOORE/NetApp-1.1.2.tgz NetApp::Filer::License 203.000000 W/WP/WPMOORE/NetApp-1.1.2.tgz NetApp::Filer::Option 203.000000 W/WP/WPMOORE/NetApp-1.1.2.tgz NetApp::Filer::TimeoutCache 334.000000 W/WP/WPMOORE/NetApp-1.1.2.tgz NetApp::Filer::Version 203.000000 W/WP/WPMOORE/NetApp-1.1.2.tgz NetApp::Qtree 334.000000 W/WP/WPMOORE/NetApp-1.1.2.tgz NetApp::Snapmirror 275.000000 W/WP/WPMOORE/NetApp-1.1.2.tgz NetApp::Snapmirror::Destination 203.000000 W/WP/WPMOORE/NetApp-1.1.2.tgz NetApp::Snapmirror::Source 203.000000 W/WP/WPMOORE/NetApp-1.1.2.tgz NetApp::Snapshot 275.000000 W/WP/WPMOORE/NetApp-1.1.2.tgz NetApp::Snapshot::Delta 203.000000 W/WP/WPMOORE/NetApp-1.1.2.tgz NetApp::Snapshot::Schedule 203.000000 W/WP/WPMOORE/NetApp-1.1.2.tgz NetApp::Volume 419.000000 W/WP/WPMOORE/NetApp-1.1.2.tgz NetApp::Volume::Source 203.000000 W/WP/WPMOORE/NetApp-1.1.2.tgz There's an obvious solution here: make the distro version something with a major version greater then 419, and then all of these will increase, PAUSE will be happy, and I can keep moving forward. However, is this the only solution? Is there any way to convince PAUSE that those older module versions didn't matter? I suspect not, but before I jump from 1.1.2 to 2.002 and then 500.0001 (420.0001 is *very*, very tempting.... :-) I'd like to be sure there's no other choice.
