Chapter 6

Stable and Development Releases

Despite all that good advice I just laid out, some of you aren't going to feel com 

fortable releasing a new version of your module with every new bug fix and 

feature. The reason usually is that you feel that your software should live up to a 

certain level of stability that requires long periods of testing to establish. This is 

laudable goal, and it doesn't have to be in conflict with the  release early, release 

often  credo.

In order to satisfy your need for stability while still reaping the benefits of fre 

quent releases, you can divide your releases into frequent development releases 

and infrequent stable releases. CPAN even has support for this built in. If your 

version number ends with an underscore followed by numbers, CPAN won't index 

it for automatic download by the CPAN module. For example, say I make a stable 

release of Data::Counter version  1.2  and then I want to release a development 

version if I give it the version number  1.2_01 , CPAN won't index it for download. 

Then when users run the following command:

$ perl  MCPAN  e  install "Data::Counter" 

they'll get the stable version. To get the development version, they'll have to down 

load it directly from CPAN the CPAN shell cannot be used to download devel 

opment versions of modules.

CAUTION The only way to create a development version that CPAN will 

recognize as such is to append an underscore and a number to the ver 

sion. It won't work to add words to the end; for example,  1.01_alpha  

will get indexed as a normal release.

Be careful not to use making development releases as an excuse to put off 

stable releases indefinitely. This may sound obvious, but many open source 

projects have been caught by this trap even Perl itself, by some accounts. All your 

users deserve the fun of a new release, not just the thrill seekers!

Making Announcements

When you do issue a new release, you should make sure people hear about it. Write 

to mailing lists where potential users hang out. (As long as such partially off topic 

posts are allowed perl5 porters is a good example of a mailing list where you 

should not send your announcements.)

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