Re^6: Back to the __future_

I understand the benefits of backward compatibility, but I want a way to specify that I (as the module author) don't care if this module breaks some day in the future. I really want to avoid the "check per Perl release" hassle that Mozilla inflicted on Firefox extension authors. They need to re-validate their add-ons with every Firefox release. I don't want to adjust the upper bound of my module compatibility with every new Perl release, but I still want to benefit from behaviour changes. Once Perl makes my module (tests) break, I can then add the upper bound of compatibility.

I guess the problem could be solved by declaring "infinity" as the upper module bound. Then Perl (testers) would know to ignore the module if a change breaks it, as I'm the one who needs to release a fresh version with the proper compatibility limits.

Another approach could be to not require versions but features, something that, in theory, the Javascript authors should be doing some years now. But I guess that somehow, use feature went wrong along the way, although I don't remember how and why, except that it is neither part of the discussion nor part of my usage patterns.

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Re^7: Back to the __future__ by JavaFan (Canon) on Aug 21, 2011 at 13:16 UTC
I still want to benefit from behaviour changes. How's that going to work? Really, how can your program benefit from an unknown behaviour change? Except for an isolated, lucky case, I cannot fathom this to be remotely useful. To me it sounds "the more breakage, the better". Because when you say "behaviour change", what you actually mean is "backwards compatability breakage". Because that's what we are talking about. Say, for instance, starting with 5.18, `use 5.18` will imply that division by default is integer division (like C). What benefit will your `use 5.12` have from getting integer division on some versions of Perl, but not on others?	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^8: Back to the __future__ by Corion (Patriarch) on Aug 21, 2011 at 13:48 UTC
Let me give an example. I have an (unreleased, DarkPAN) module, List::Part::SmartMatch, which uses the "Smart"match operator `~~` to do matching on a criterion. I don't want to rename this module to List::Part::SmartMatch::5_010 , because actually that module does not care about what the smartmatch operator does. And it's highly unlikely that any user of this module wants anything else than "their view" of how "Smart"match currently behaves. I presume that maybe with 5.016 or later, the `~~` operator gets fixed, but if I had to specify one fixed version for my modules semantics, it would have to stay forever with the broken smartmatch semantics to no fault of its own. This is one case where it would help to either be able to specify "Infinite" upwards compatibility (at least from the foreseeable future), or a convenient way to specify "I want the smartmatch behaviour that my caller expects". Except that the latter would basically be dynamic runtime dispatch of operators, which would be convenient for my case but horrible overkill in the general case.	[reply] [d/l] [select]