Moose::Manual::Support - Policies regarding support, releases, and compatibility.
Moose uses the release early, release often philosophy. Moose is not released on a schedule. Releases happen as new features and bug fixes are required.
There have been to date, 98 releases of Moose over just under four years. This is an average of a release every two weeks.
Moose has always prioritized correctness over performance and backwards compatibility.
Major deprecations or API changes are first documented in the Changes file as well as in Moose::Manual::Delta
Moose then attempts to warn for deprecated features and API changes for a reasonable number of releases before breaking any tested API.
Moose will also warn during installation if the version being installed will break a known installed dependency. Unfortunately due to the nature of the Perl install process these warnings may be easy to miss.
We try to ensure compatibility by having a extensive test suite (last count just over around 5123 tests), as well as testing a number of packages (currently just under 100 packages) that depend on Moose before any release.
The current list of downstream dependencies that are tested is in xt/author/test-my-dependents.t.
xt/author/test-my-dependents.t
Moose's version numbers are monotonically incrementing two decimal values. The version numbers in Moose are not semantic. This means that version 1.00 will be the hundredth release, nothing more.
Occasionally, we will release a test release with a version like 0.90_03. These versions may be less stable than non-test releases, and exist so that developers can test potentially code-breaking changes. By default, the CPAN client will not install a distribution which has an underscore in its version.
Moose was declared production ready at version 0.18 (via http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=608144).
Moose has an open contribution policy. Anybody is welcome to submit a patch. Please see Moose::Manual::Contributing for more details.
To install Moose, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm
cpanm Moose
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell install Moose
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.