The Lyon Compromise from the Perl QA Conference

Adapted from https://gist.github.com/dagolden/9559280 to keep all the QA conference decisions together. Original gist was created by David Golden.

This document summarizes broad decisions about rationalizing version object behavior based on discussions at the Lyon QAH. Participants: David Golden, Ricardo Signes, Karen Etheridge, Leon Timmermans, Peter Rabbitson and Graham Knop

version comparision should be done irrespective of the presence of underscores in the string used to initialize the version object
underscore should no longer be used as a tuple separator in vstrings or vstring-like strings; vstrings are converted to tuples by splitting into characters (not bytes) and converting to codepoints; any elements after the first must be in the range 0-999
numify/normal should produce a standarized string representation without underscores
stringify should produce the best possible representation of the value used to initialize the version object; it should include underscores only if the initializing value was a non-vstring string.
floating point numbers used as initializers are converted to a decimal string form at the precision limit of the architecture; people will be warned about this in the documentation

Examples:

Comparison:
    - version->new(1.0203)      ==      version->new("1.0203")
    - version->new(1.02_03)     ==      version->new("1.02_03")
    - version->new(v1.2.3)      ==      version->new("v1.2.3")
    - version->new(v1.2.3_0)    ==      version->new("v1.2.3_0")

Underscore no longer tuple separator:
    - version->new(v1.2.3_0)    ->      tuple (1,2,30)
    - version->new("v1.2.3_0")  ->      tuple (1,2,30)

Numify/normalize don't produce underscore:
    - version->new("1.0203")->numify    -> "1.0203"
    - version->new("1.0203")->normal    -> "v1.20.300"
    - version->new("1.02_03")->numify   -> "1.0203"
    - version->new("1.02_03")->normal   -> "v1.20.300"
    - version->new("v1.2.30")->numify   -> "1.002030"
    - version->new("v1.2.30")->normal   -> "v1.2.30"
    - version->new("v1.2.3_0")->numify  -> "1.002030"
    - version->new("v1.2.3_0")->normal  -> "v1.2.30"

Stringify should attempt to preserve string initializers:
    - version->new("1.0203")->stringify     -> "1.0203"
    - version->new("1.02_03")->stringify    -> "1.02_03"
    - version->new("v1.2.30")->stringify    -> "v1.2.30"
    - version->new("v1.2.3_0")->stringify   -> "v1.2.3_0"
    - version->new(1.0203)->stringify       -> "1.0203"
    - version->new(1.02_03)->stringify      -> "1.0203"
    - version->new(v1.2.30)->stringify      -> "v1.2.30"
    - version->new(v1.2.3_0)->stringify     -> "v1.2.30"

Document created on 2016-02-27 07:01:29 -0500 by David Golden. Document last modified on 2016-04-23 15:45:56 +0200 by Philippe Bruhat (BooK).