I, too, gave up on 3 part version strings after problems with CPAN, PAUSE, ExtUtils::MakeMaker and so on. Additionally, I ensure that my version numbers always have 3 significant digits because trailing zeros tend to get truncated with things like 'make dist'. Thus, I go from 0.09 to 0.11, and 1.99 to 2.01. This seems to make everything happy and sane.