| Moose::Manual::Support - phpMan
Moose::Manual::Support(3pm) User Contributed Perl Documentation Moose::Manual::Support(3pm)
NAME
Moose::Manual::Support - Policies regarding support, releases, and compatibility.
VERSION
version 2.1213
SUPPORT POLICY
There are two principles to Moose's policy of supported behavior.
1. Moose favors correctness over everything.
2. Moose supports documented and tested behavior, not accidental behavior or side
effects.
If a behavior has never been documented or tested, the behavior is officially undefined.
Relying upon undocumented and untested behavior is done at your own risk.
If a behavior is documented or tested but found to be incorrect later, the behavior will
go through a deprecation period. During the deprecation period, use of that feature will
cause a warning. Eventually, the deprecated feature will be removed.
In some cases, it is not possible to deprecate a behavior. In this case, the behavior will
simply be changed in a major release.
RELEASE SCHEDULE
Moose is on a system of quarterly major releases, with minor releases as needed between
major releases. A minor release is defined as one that makes every attempt to preserve
backwards compatibility. Currently this means that we did not introduce any new dependency
conflicts, and that we did not make any changes to documented or tested behavior (this
typically means that minor releases will not change any existing tests in the test suite,
although they can add new ones). A minor release can include new features and bug fixes.
Major releases may be backwards incompatible. Moose prioritizes correctness over backwards
compatibility or performance; see the DEPRECATION POLICY to understand how backwards
incompatible changes are announced.
Major releases are scheduled to happen during fixed release windows. If the window is
missed, then there will not be a major release until the next release window. The release
windows are one month long, and occur during the months of January, April, July, and
October.
Before a major release, a series of development releases will be made so that users can
test the upcoming major release before it is distributed to CPAN. It is in the best
interests of everyone involved if these releases are tested as widely as possible.
DEPRECATION POLICY
Moose has always prioritized correctness over performance and backwards compatibility.
Major deprecations or API changes are documented in the Changes file as well as in
Moose::Manual::Delta. The Moose developers will also make an effort to warn users of
upcoming deprecations and breakage through the Moose blog (http://blog.moose.perl.org).
Deprecated APIs will be preserved for at least one year after the major release which
deprecates that API. Deprecated APIs will only be removed in a major release.
Moose will also warn during installation if the version of Moose being installed will
break an installed dependency. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the Perl install
process these warnings may be easy to miss.
BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY
We try to ensure compatibility by having a extensive test suite (last count over 18000
tests), as well as testing a number of packages (currently just under 100 packages) that
depend on Moose before any release.
The current list of downstream dependencies that are tested is in
"xt/author/test-my-dependents.t".
VERSION NUMBERS
Moose version numbers consist of three parts, in the form X.YYZZ. The X is the "special
magic number" that only gets changed for really big changes. Think of this as being like
the "5" in Perl 5.12.1.
The YY portion is the major version number. Moose uses even numbers for stable releases,
and odd numbers for trial releases. The ZZ is the minor version, and it simply increases
monotonically. It starts at "00" each time a new major version is released.
Semantically, this means that any two releases which share a major version should be API-
compatible with each other. In other words, 2.0200, 2.0201, and 2.0274 are all API-
compatible.
Prior to version 2.0, Moose version numbers were monotonically incrementing two decimal
values (0.01, 0.02, ... 1.11, 1.12, etc.).
Moose was declared production ready at version 0.18 (via
<http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=608144>).
PERL VERSION COMPATIBILITY
As of version 2.16, Moose will officially support being run on perl 5.10.1+. Our current
policy is to support the earliest version of Perl shipped in the latest stable release of
any major operating system (this tends to mean CentOS). We will provide at least six
months notice (two major releases) when we decide to increase the officially supported
Perl version.
"Officially supported" does not mean that these are the only versions of Perl that Moose
will work with. Our declared perl dependency will remain at 5.8.3 as long as our test
suite continues to pass on 5.8.3. What this does mean is that the core Moose dev team will
not be spending any time fixing bugs on versions that aren't officially supported, and new
contributions will not be rejected due to being incompatible with older versions of perl
except in the most trivial of cases. We will, however, still welcome patches to make Moose
compatible with earlier versions, if other people are still interested in maintaining
compatibility. As such, the current minimum required version of 5.8.3 will remain for as
long as downstream users are happy to assist with maintenance.
Note that although performance regressions are acceptable in order to maintain backwards
compatibility (as long as they only affect the older versions), functionality changes and
buggy behavior will not be. If it becomes impossible to provide identical functionality
between modern Perl versions and unsupported Perl versions, we will increase our declared
perl dependency instead.
CONTRIBUTING
Moose has an open contribution policy. Anybody is welcome to submit a patch. Please see
Moose::Manual::Contributing for more details.
AUTHORS
· Stevan Little <stevan.little AT iinteractive.com>
· Dave Rolsky <autarch AT urth.org>
· Jesse Luehrs <doy AT tozt.net>
· Shawn M Moore <code AT sartak.org>
· XXXX XXX'XX (Yuval Kogman) <nothingmuch AT woobling.org>
· Karen Etheridge <ether AT cpan.org>
· Florian Ragwitz <rafl AT debian.org>
· Hans Dieter Pearcey <hdp AT weftsoar.net>
· Chris Prather <chris AT prather.org>
· Matt S Trout <mst AT shadowcat.uk>
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
This software is copyright (c) 2006 by Infinity Interactive, Inc..
This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as
the Perl 5 programming language system itself.
perl v5.20.1 2014-09-25 Moose::Manual::Support(3pm)
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