1Moose::Manual::Support(U3s)er Contributed Perl DocumentatMiooonse::Manual::Support(3)
2
6 Moose::Manual::Support - Policies regarding support, releases, and
7 compatibility.
8
10 version 2.2201
11
13 There are two principles to Moose's policy of supported behavior.
14 1. Moose favors correctness over everything.
16 2. Moose supports documented and tested behavior, not accidental
18 behavior or side effects.
19 If a behavior has never been documented or tested, the behavior is
21 officially undefined. Relying upon undocumented and untested behavior
22 is done at your own risk.
23 If a behavior is documented or tested but found to be incorrect later,
25 the behavior will go through a deprecation period. During the
26 deprecation period, use of that feature will cause a warning.
27 Eventually, the deprecated feature will be removed.
28 In some cases, it is not possible to deprecate a behavior. In this
30 case, the behavior will simply be changed in a major release.
31
33 Moose is on a system of quarterly major releases, with minor releases
34 as needed between major releases. A minor release is defined as one
35 that makes every attempt to preserve backwards compatibility. Currently
36 this means that we did not introduce any new dependency conflicts, and
37 that we did not make any changes to documented or tested behavior (this
38 typically means that minor releases will not change any existing tests
39 in the test suite, although they can add new ones). A minor release can
40 include new features and bug fixes.
41 Major releases may be backwards incompatible. Moose prioritizes
43 correctness over backwards compatibility or performance; see the
44 DEPRECATION POLICY to understand how backwards incompatible changes are
45 announced.
46 Major releases are scheduled to happen during fixed release windows. If
48 the window is missed, then there will not be a major release until the
49 next release window. The release windows are one month long, and occur
50 during the months of January, April, July, and October.
51 Before a major release, a series of development releases will be made
53 so that users can test the upcoming major release before it is
54 distributed to CPAN. It is in the best interests of everyone involved
55 if these releases are tested as widely as possible.
56
58 Moose has always prioritized correctness over performance and backwards
59 compatibility.
60 Major deprecations or API changes are documented in the Changes file as
62 well as in Moose::Manual::Delta. The Moose developers will also make an
63 effort to warn users of upcoming deprecations and breakage through the
64 Moose blog (http://blog.moose.perl.org).
65 Deprecated APIs will be preserved for at least one year after the major
67 release which deprecates that API. Deprecated APIs will only be removed
68 in a major release.
69 Moose will also warn during installation if the version of Moose being
71 installed will break an installed dependency. Unfortunately, due to the
72 nature of the Perl install process these warnings may be easy to miss.
73
75 We try to ensure compatibility by having a extensive test suite (last
76 count over 18000 tests), as well as testing a number of packages
77 (currently just under 100 packages) that depend on Moose before any
78 release.
79 The current list of downstream dependencies that are tested is in
81 "xt/author/test-my-dependents.t".
82
84 Moose version numbers consist of three parts, in the form X.YYZZ. The X
85 is the "special magic number" that only gets changed for really big
86 changes. Think of this as being like the "5" in Perl 5.12.1.
87 The YY portion is the major version number. Moose uses even numbers for
89 stable releases, and odd numbers for trial releases. The ZZ is the
90 minor version, and it simply increases monotonically. It starts at "00"
91 each time a new major version is released.
92 Semantically, this means that any two releases which share a major
94 version should be API-compatible with each other. In other words,
95 2.0200, 2.0201, and 2.0274 are all API-compatible.
96 Prior to version 2.0, Moose version numbers were monotonically
98 incrementing two decimal values (0.01, 0.02, ... 1.11, 1.12, etc.).
99 Moose was declared production ready at version 0.18 (via
101 <http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=608144>).
102
104 As of version 2.16, Moose will officially support being run on perl
105 5.10.1+. Our current policy is to support the earliest version of Perl
106 shipped in the latest stable release of any major operating system
107 (this tends to mean CentOS). We will provide at least six months notice
108 (two major releases) when we decide to increase the officially
109 supported Perl version.
110 "Officially supported" does not mean that these are the only versions
112 of Perl that Moose will work with. Our declared perl dependency will
113 remain at 5.8.3 as long as our test suite continues to pass on 5.8.3.
114 What this does mean is that the core Moose dev team will not be
115 spending any time fixing bugs on versions that aren't officially
116 supported, and new contributions will not be rejected due to being
117 incompatible with older versions of perl except in the most trivial of
118 cases. We will, however, still welcome patches to make Moose compatible
119 with earlier versions, if other people are still interested in
120 maintaining compatibility. As such, the current minimum required
121 version of 5.8.3 will remain for as long as downstream users are happy
122 to assist with maintenance.
123 Note that although performance regressions are acceptable in order to
125 maintain backwards compatibility (as long as they only affect the older
126 versions), functionality changes and buggy behavior will not be. If it
127 becomes impossible to provide identical functionality between modern
128 Perl versions and unsupported Perl versions, we will increase our
129 declared perl dependency instead.
130
132 Moose has an open contribution policy. Anybody is welcome to submit a
133 patch. Please see Moose::Manual::Contributing for more details.
134
136 • Stevan Little <stevan@cpan.org>
137 • Dave Rolsky <autarch@urth.org>
139 • Jesse Luehrs <doy@cpan.org>
141 • Shawn M Moore <sartak@cpan.org>
143 • יובל קוג'מן (Yuval Kogman) <nothingmuch@woobling.org>
145 • Karen Etheridge <ether@cpan.org>
147 • Florian Ragwitz <rafl@debian.org>
149 • Hans Dieter Pearcey <hdp@cpan.org>
151 • Chris Prather <chris@prather.org>
153 • Matt S Trout <mstrout@cpan.org>
155
157 This software is copyright (c) 2006 by Infinity Interactive, Inc.
158 This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
160 the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.
161perl v5.36.0 2022-07-22 Moose::Manual::Support(3)