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Perl Versioning Scheme and Gentoo

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The Gentoo Perl Versioning Scheme

A common observation/confusion people have is that the versions used on Perl related things in Gentoo don't directly correspond to upstream versions.

This is because Upstream uses 2 different schemes, and one of those schemes is fundamentally incompatible with Gentoos.

The Problem

In most people's mind, this is how version numbers sort:

1.0 1.1 1.5 1.10 1.15 1.20 1.45

This is because you read . as a delimiter for multiple integers.

However, in Perl, those same versions sort as follows:

1.0 1.1 1.10 1.15 1.20 1.45 1.5

Because these versions are all treated as floating point, and yes, 1.1 and 1.10 are the same version.

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