Chapter 6
Stable and Development Releases
Despite all that good advice I just laid out, some of you aren't going to feel com 
fortable releasing a new version of your module with every new bug fix and 
feature. The reason usually is that you feel that your software should live up to a 
certain level of stability that requires long periods of testing to establish. This is 
laudable goal, and it doesn't have to be in conflict with the  release early, release 
often  credo.
In order to satisfy your need for stability while still reaping the benefits of fre 
quent releases, you can divide your releases into frequent development releases 
and infrequent stable releases. CPAN even has support for this built in. If your 
version number ends with an underscore followed by numbers, CPAN won't index 
it for automatic download by the CPAN module. For example, say I make a stable 
release of Data::Counter version  1.2  and then I want to release a development 
version if I give it the version number  1.2_01 , CPAN won't index it for download. 
Then when users run the following command:
$ perl  MCPAN  e  install "Data::Counter" 
they'll get the stable version. To get the development version, they'll have to down 
load it directly from CPAN the CPAN shell cannot be used to download devel 
opment versions of modules.
CAUTION The only way to create a development version that CPAN will 
recognize as such is to append an underscore and a number to the ver 
sion. It won't work to add words to the end; for example,  1.01_alpha  
will get indexed as a normal release.
Be careful not to use making development releases as an excuse to put off 
stable releases indefinitely. This may sound obvious, but many open source 
projects have been caught by this trap even Perl itself, by some accounts. All your 
users deserve the fun of a new release, not just the thrill seekers!
Making Announcements
When you do issue a new release, you should make sure people hear about it. Write 
to mailing lists where potential users hang out. (As long as such partially off topic 
posts are allowed perl5 porters is a good example of a mailing list where you 
should not send your announcements.)
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