On Oct 11, 2018, at 10:39 PM, belg4mit@pthbb.org via RT <bug-IO-Pager@rt.cpan.org> wrote:
Show quoted text
But they’re not the same. I found this because I have a nightly job that builds RPMs for our CentOS servers. The RPM toolchain assumes that the directory a tarball unpacks into has the same name as the tarball itself. I learned of this issue when the build job failed.
This demonstrates the difference between a string and a float version:
Show quoted text > perl -E 'say version->new(1.40); say version->new("1.40")'
1.4
1.40
Some places it’s treated as a string, such as in your tarball name). Other places treated as as a float, such as in your META.json file:
https://metacpan.org/source/JPIERCE/IO-Pager-0.40/META.json#L52
This inconsistency causes problems. Most folks don’t expect to go from 1.39 to 1.4.
Furthermore, let’s say I wanted to look up the distribution via the MetaCPAN API (which, FWIW, my nightly job in fact does). If I’ve read the version from the META.json file, I know to make a query like this:
curl -XPOST
https://fastapi.metacpan.org/v1/file/_search -d '{
"query": { "filtered":{
"query":{"match_all":{}},
"filter":{"and":[
{"term":{"module.name":"IO::Pager"}},
{"term":{"module.version":0.4}}
]}
}},
"fields":["release"]
}'
Which returns the results. But if I looked at the the page on the MetaCPAN site:
https://metacpan.org/release/IO-Pager
Oh, I see “IO-Pager-0.40” there. So if I queried for version "0.40" above, it returns no results. Even though if I use the full distribution name, it works!
https://fastapi.metacpan.org/v1/release/JPIERCE/IO-Pager-0.40
But this doesn’t:
https://fastapi.metacpan.org/v1/release/JPIERCE/IO-Pager-0.4
There are a slew of places in which this difference in the handling of stringified and numerified versions can be handled inconsistently by Perl and the toolchain. I guarantee there are tools that think 1.4 is lower than 1.39, because 4 < 39.
The best solution is always declare versions as strings:
our $VERSION = '0.40’;
Then the whole problem goes away. But if one decides to always use a float, the only way around this issue is to never have trailing 0s, but always have the same precision. So 1.40 would be out, but 1.41 is fine.
I recommend switching to strings:
--- a/lib/IO/Pager/Buffered.pm
+++ b/lib/IO/Pager/Buffered.pm
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
package IO::Pager::Buffered;
-our $VERSION = 0.40;
+our $VERSION = '0.41';
use strict;
use base qw( IO::Pager );
--- a/lib/IO/Pager.pm
+++ b/lib/IO/Pager.pm
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
package IO::Pager;
-our $VERSION = 0.40; #Untouched since 0.40
+our $VERSION = '0.41'; #Untouched since 0.40
use 5.008; #At least, for decent perlio, and other modernisms
use strict;
This change will permanently fix broken toolchain and packaging systems, as long as one uses strings from here on in.
