Re: Versioned provides ... a necessity !

[Chip Salzenberg <chip@perlsupport.com>]

According to Jules Bean:
> For their own reaons, which are opaque to me [but are almost certainly
> documented somewhere - try perl5-porters] upstream has decided to change
> the path-names.  They've done this because they think most modules won't
> continute to work, I imagine.  So we shouldn't defy their policy.

No; only the BINARY interface for shared libs has changed incompatibly.

The standard library pathnames have changed because provided modules'
versions have changed, and sometimes the new modules won't work with
old perl binaries.  If we overwrite an old Data::Dumper with the new
one, and if the new one used 5.005-specific features, then programs
using Perl 5.004 and Data::Dumper would fail.  That's bad.

But any Perl-only module that's compatible with e.g. 5.004 should work
without change under 5.005.

So e.g. libwww-perl should NOT need updating.

OTOH, any module that includes a shared library -- what Perl calls an
"extension" -- _will_ need to be recompiled for 5.005.
-- 
Chip Salzenberg      - a.k.a. -      <chip@perlsupport.com>
      "When do you work?"   "Whenever I'm not busy."