On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 7:24 PM, Michael G Schwern via RT
<bug-ExtUtils-MakeMaker@rt.cpan.org> wrote:
Show quoted text> There's an open issue about what to do about this:
>
> package Foo 1.23;
> our $VERSION = 2.34;
>
> parse_version() will say 1.23 on the "use the first thing" principle.
> 5.11.2 will say 2.34 since there's nothing saying you can't assign to
> $VERSION.
>
> I'm tempted to leave it as is, parse_version() has always taken the
> "don't do that" stance to altering $VERSION. But maybe Perl should make
> $VERSION readonly if its been declared via package? If you really want
> to you can always turn it off.
I think at this point, we can leave it as is. It's conceptually no
different than:
package Foo;
our $VERSION = 1.23;
$VERSION = 2.34;
People have always been able to do stupid things to $VERSION if they want to.
Making $VERSION readonly now is probably too risky when Perl 5.11 is
in a freeze period. In Perl 5.13, we can have 'package NAME VERSION'
set it readonly and we'll have a year to sort out any issues.
-- David
