Suggestion for an addition to the spec

[jonasbn]

Hello Bricas,

I was participating in a quest on Questhub, which involved your CPAN distribution CPAN::Changes, which is a most magnificent distribution.

After the quest ended for my sake I wrote up a blog post on my experiences and reflections, some people pointed me to contacting you on possible extension of the CPAN::Changes::Spec based on findings.

So I was most happy to find your distribution on Github and here is my pull request for evaluation.

The basic idea is to have an update hint as part of the release headline, like so (lifted from my POD change):

       0.03 2010−08−01 − update recommended

        − Fixed serious bug in bar method


       0.02 2009−07−17 − update not required

        − Added more foo() tests

       0.01 2009−07−16

        − Initial release

The hint is optional, but it would nice to be able to perhaps implement a strict mode, where it would be required. Please contact me if you have any questions, suggestions etc. or simply pull the request and change it to suit your needs or take whatever you need from my suggestion and run with it.

Looking forward to hearing from you - have a nice weekend,

jonasbn, Copenhagen/Denmark

[haarg]

This reuses the same location as notes in the syntax, so it could mean existing users of CPAN::Changes would lose the information you are trying to promote, unless they were updated to use the new API.

Picking two rather strings to handle specially seems pretty questionable. I'd rather base something like this on prior art. Have you seen changelogs with information like this in them?

It seems like it may make more sense to handle this as a "release type" rather than a binary "important/not important".

[jonasbn]

Picking two rather strings to handle specially seems pretty questionable. I'd rather base something like > this on prior art. Have you seen changelogs with information like this in them?

For now I am using this for my own distributions, I liked the practice and considered the pattern pretty useful and the simplicity (binary) aspects quite important, but I will stick to notes for now. The concept was just a suggestion for a future API improvement.