[Module::Build] Making 0.28 a reality

[John P. <jpe...@ro...>]

Folks -

What can I do to help get 0.28 out the door.  I was using 0.27_07 and released
version-0.54 to CPAN and promptly broke every module trying to upgrade that
depends on version due to a limitation in 0.2611.  It seems that
have_c_compiler() depends on _build/ existing, yet _build/ isn't created until
you call create_build_script() which I wasn't doing until after I found out
whether there was a compiler available.  Chicken <=> Egg.  Needless to say,
version-0.55 is out now. :(

I know, *my fault*, not Module::Build's, but still, it makes me want to use
Module::Install now... ;-)

Where we left the earlier discussion was that the version.pm patch to M::B would
require upgrading the YAML dependency to 0.58.  The issue was that this would
[mostly] silently disable the YAML support for people who didn't notice.  There
seems to be two ways around it:

1) write a routine to query the user whether they wanted to upgrade YAML at the
same time and then make it a prereq;

or

2) just go ahead and make YAML a prereq of 0.28.

Is there any reason why #2 isn't the way to go?  Is M::B really wedded to the
_write_minimal_metadata code for some reason?  Isn't YAML stable enough?  YAML
doesn't appear to have any non-core dependencies (according to module_info):

Modules used:
    YAML::Base
    YAML::Dumper::Base
    YAML::Node
    base
    constant
    strict
    warnings

That would certainly be the cleanest way to deal with it.

As a third option, if I had to, I could produce a patch that would force the
version objects to stringify before being added to the YAML $node.  But this is
especially ugly and hackish.

Note also that I forgot this on my previous patch:

$ svk diff lib/Module/Build/Base.pm
=== lib/Module/Build/Base.pm
==================================================================
--- lib/Module/Build/Base.pm    (revision 1830)
+++ lib/Module/Build/Base.pm    (local)
@@ -1090,10 +1090,6 @@
   my $self = shift;
   my ($v1, $op, $v2) = @_;

-  # for alpha versions - this doesn't cover all cases, but should work for most:
-  $v1 =~ s/_(\d+)\z/$1/;
-  $v2 =~ s/_(\d+)\z/$1/;
-
   my $eval_str = "\$v1 $op \$v2";
   my $result   = eval $eval_str;
   $self->log_warn("error comparing versions: '$eval_str' $@") if $@;

since version objects work fine as alpha versions.  After 0.28 is out, I can
move more of the version code to Module::Build::version and simplify a lot of
code in the process.

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
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