David Golden wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 4:42 PM, Michael G Schwern <schw...@pobox.com> wrote:
>> And that's that.  Have version.pm *always* output at least X.Y.Z.  X.Y 
>> becomes
>> X.Y.0 or is simply disallowed.  Then there's no confusion and no special vX.Y
>> format.
> 
> The problem I could see is what to do with alpha versions (an arguably
> bad legacy decision):
> 
>    X.Y_Z
> 
> Is it a number?  Or is it a tuple?

It's suck, that's what it is.

It's a number.  It's equivalent to X.YZ.  It always has been.  Leave it that
way, there's no benefit to changing it now.

Do not extend the _Z convention into version.pm.  The state of a release does
not belong in the version number.  Its an inflexible system that complicates
version comparisons even more.  We already have a sane means of recording
release metadata, it is META.yml.  Stick the release info in there.


> I sort of prefer the opposite approach -- anything with a leading v is
> a tuple (splitting on "." or "_"), ideally with at least 3 components.
>  Anything without is a number.  Anything with multiple dots without a
> leading "v" is an error (but we should do the right thing anyway).
> That seems pretty unambiguous to me.

Let's go through the reasons for having the v marker.

X.Y.Z is always a tuple.  It's obviously not a number.  What else could it be?
 It does not need a leading v.

Same goes for X.Y.Z.A and so forth.  So they don't need any disambiguation.

That leaves X and X.Y.  The only reason for the leading v is to disambiguate X
and X.Y, the numbers, from X and X.Y, the tuples.  If we disallow X and X.Y
tuples, there's no more ambiguity, no more v and no more special parsing.

Which brings us down to this:  What does allowing X and X.Y as tuples really
buy us that's worth the extra parsing and rules?  What about just converting
them to X.0.0 and X.Y.0?


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