David, Could you please tell us what you think about the only.pm module, which seems to fix the problem rather well, and how it compares with your solution. Cheers, Nadim.
Nadim:
There are at least five different working solutions to interface change on CPAN.
I just became of the role of the optional VERSION subroutine in the C<use> documentation
recently and have been promoting an approach based on the features present in
core perl rather than trying to research all these different versioning modules.
I change the name of the module when I make an interface change but not when
I implement features which are only implemented as C<croak "feature not implemented yet">
in earlier versions, in the modules I release to CPAN. (such as DirDB and FTP::DirDB)
I will be including VERSION routines when appropriate in the future.
David Manura's proposed code in an earlier post in this thread is consistent with
the approach I reccommend.
There's a lot of talk about "backwards compatability" but not as much about "forwards
compatibility." Forwards compatability implies imagining a point of view from the
future, and an acceptance that current (best? known? practiced?) practice is flawed.
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By the way, can anyone loan me ten grand? please contact me off list if you can,
include "perl mongers" in your message to get through the filter
