in reply to Re^3: Don't use 5.6.N (why guess?)
in thread Don't use 5.6.N

I think you misunderstood me. I could've made dbm-deep work with 5.0.0, if I'd really wanted to. But, I didn't want to work harder on backwards-compatibility than I was working on features. I have enough problems maintaining OS-compatibility, as it is. So, I chose to put a hard-demarcation in. I could've easily chosen 5.008 instead of 5.006.

Once that demarcation was chosen, that freed up certain features for use. But, the line wasn't chosen for the features - it was chosen for the personal sanity. And, "use 5.006;" says exactly what it needs to say "This software is only going to work with this version or higher".

Now, granted, this discussion is starting me down the road of "I need to document the why behind this assertion in the POD" and I now will. Sometimes, my good friend, you make me think too much! :-)

My criteria for good software:
  1. Does it work?
  2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

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Re^5: Don't use 5.6.N (why guess?)
by tye (Sage) on Oct 17, 2007 at 18:05 UTC

    No, I didn't misunderstand. Neither warnings.pm nor our is ever a requirement. And in other threads I've even explained why I consider doing "use warnings;" in a module to be a mistake and why use vars is better than our.

    The new features are usually quite minor improvements (and often mixed blessings). Though they are often touted (usually by their inventors and usually before anyone has had any time to really use them) as being profoundly important and people (understandably) tend to believe the standard documentation (written by the inventor of the new feature) and so this touting spreads.

    But the further back you go, the larger the collection of minor features is and the more work it is to forego the sum total of these minor improvements.

    Please at least include next to your "use 5.006;" line a pointer to the section in your POD that explains it (when you write it). And consider doing "BEGIN { require 5.006; }" so automated tools can better parse the failure reason.

    - tye        

[reply]
      I'm curious. You're recommending "BEGIN { require 5.006; }" instead of "use 5.006;". Aren't they identical?
      My criteria for good software:
      1. Does it work?
      2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?
[reply]

        Yes, they are the same.

        The only thing you need to be careful of is to say 5.006 instead of 5.6.0. The former will spit out an error message that makes sense to testing tools, the later in a syntax error: 

        $ perl-5.005_05/bin/perl -e 'use 5.6.0;'
syntax error at -e line 1, near "use 5.6"
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.

        [download]
        $ perl-5.005_05/bin/perl -e 'use 5.006;'
Perl 5.006 required--this is only version 5.00505, stopped at -e line 
+1.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at -e line 1.

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