Re^2: Is VERSION > 999 allowed?

Thanks for the replies. I'll bump the version to 1000.x and make the using modules require that.

@hippo - the reason you can't find the affected versions on CPAN is that I deleted them (via pause). Anyway CPAN *indexed* the releases correctly, i.e. as 3.024 was indexed as 3.024. However once any version with the extra $VERSION declaration is installed on a cpan-testers machine, the test machinery (or maybe cpanm) thinks it has version 999.999 and so won't update it.

For example, see http://www.cpantesters.org/cpan/report/b4581f16-132e-11ee-8887-54486e8775ea

The test fails because "Spreadsheet::Edit::IO version 3.03 required--this is only version 3.022". This should not happen because version '3.030' is a dependency listed in META.yml and so that version (or later) should have been installed. The explanation becomes clear looking further down where it says:

Prerequisite modules loaded:
requires:

    Module                    Need     Have    
    ------------------------- -------- --------
    Algorithm::Diff           0        1.201   
    ...
    Spreadsheet::Edit         3.025    999.999 
    Spreadsheet::Edit::IO     3.030    999.999 <****

The test machine installed v3.022 previously, but now it thinks it has v999.999.

Comment on Re^2: Is VERSION > 999 allowed?

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Re^3: Is VERSION > 999 allowed? by NERDVANA (Priest) on Jun 28, 2023 at 19:12 UTC
I find this strange, because I was pretty sure that the only way to check the installed version of a module was to load it and call ->VERSION. There isn't any database of package versions within a perl installation that I know of. Are you sure that when you load the published version 3.03 and call ->VERSION it returns '3.03'? Meanwhile, yes the CPAN tooling does manually parse out your version rather than evaling untrusted code. One thing I have done to solve similar problems (where I needed there to be a version for testing but was injecting the real version as dist build time) was put `# VERSION $MYPACKAGE::VERSION \|\|= '999';` [download] So, let the real one come first, then apply one if it doesn't exist. Maybe just to be really sure tooling can't parse the bogus version, you could write it as a harder-to-parse expression, before 'use strict': `package MYPACKAGE; # VERSION ${ __PACKAGE__ . '::VER' . 'SION' } \|\|= 210; use strict;` [download] Edit:** Oh! HAH, I remember now, I stopped doing that because I contributed the 'overwrite' option, which allows you to write `[OurPkgVersion] overwrite = 1` [download] `package MYPACKAGE; our $VERSION= '999'; # VERSION` [download] and it just gets overwritten with the real version when released.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Is VERSION > 999 allowed? by hippo (Archbishop) on Jun 29, 2023 at 08:34 UTC
Thanks for this extra info - I now understand that it was only the module versions which were incorrect but the dist version was correct. That explains why I couldn't find version 999.999 on CPAN or BackPAN. However once any version with the extra $VERSION declaration is installed on a cpan-testers machine, the test machinery (or maybe cpanm) thinks it has version 999.999 and so won't update it. That should only be temporary, I would have thought. See this recent discussion regarding common dependencies not being present on smoke testers' machines. They might not all work this same way, of course - I'm not running a smoke tester (yet) so can't comment further on that. Anyway, you've taken the plunge with the 4-digit major version now so this is all moot. 🦛	[reply]