I have a set of modules published on CPAN, and I need to push a new major release that will introduce some (controlled) breakage. The problem is somewhat complicated by the fact that the modules in question have interconnected dependencies on each other:

• Foo is the core dependency
• Foo::Bar, Foo::Baz, and Foo::Qux depend on Foo
• Foo::Bar::Fred depends on Foo::Bar
• Foo::Bar::Clunk depends on Foo::Bar::Fred
• Test::Foo depends on Foo::Bar::Fred, and Foo::Bar::Clunk

Practically this means that when core Foo introduces breaking changes, the whole suite must be lifted from version X to version Y. I would like to minimize the impact; a logical way would be to keep both old and new versions independent but I don't see a way to do that with CPAN, except assigning the new version a something_blah number and thus prohibit the automatic tools from trying to upgrade to this "dev" version.

What is a good strategy to deal with this kind of situations? I'm sure it will happen again, if not with this pack of modules then with another, and the next time I'd like to plan ahead.

Regards,
Alex.

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