Perlbrew 1.00

Perlbrew 1.00

perlbrew 1.00 was released on 2024/10/4, a day when I (@gugod) was in a personal trip to the city of Hakodate, right before the awesome conference of YAPC::Hakodate, 2024, in which I gave a short presentation titled "perlbrew 3000!" -- it's a brief history of perlbrew, when we look back from year 3000.

While I'm generally just inchworming my way forward on various hobby projects, it is also sometimes needed to temporarily become a futurist, leaping forward in time in great steps, then look backward. It's indeed easier that way, as Jensen Huang has described how himself not envisioning the future, since, well, it's all in the history book now.

Very often, the version number 1.0 means something special, but to put in to the history of perlbrew, it is merely a version that comes after 0.99, and the 91st relesae since version 0.10 -- the very the beginning of perlbrew. Thanks to the internet and the participant of OSDC.tw -- we could still look backward in time, and found the very first public announcement of perlbrew 0.10 on youtube..

With or without any specialtiy in the social status of version numbers, whole-number versions does sits in the position of being milestones, and generally means something major, with enough maturity, or something that might be breaking with past versions. That would be enough reasons for me to aggregate my thoughts together and making up a much longer release notes for perlbrew 1.00.

Oh yes, it's 1.00, not 1.0. Not just because two 0s are better one, but because conventionally I've been using 2 digits in the 2nd part of version numbers, and I intend to keep it as a convention of the perlbrew project. So the next major milestone would be 2.00, but not 2.0.

Someone might argue about why having such subtle differences since, 1.00 vs 1.0, they don't meaning different things: it's the same point in the multi-dimensional plane of version numbers and they are both parsed as the same version object by most of version-number-parsing libraries (I hope.)

Suffice to say, that it's the job the author, to give arbitrary meanings to the version numbers of their software, and if you ask me, I'd say it's non-sense to use even numbers to mean stability and odd numbers to meaning instability. Prime numbers should be used to mean something stable, since they are not breakable. I may eventually engage with that rule.

Anyhow, perlbrew 1.00 is out and we are now on the path to perlbrew 3000. I wholeheartly thank to the 148 contributors who've spent their valuable time and provides commits for the perlbrew project.

To get to perlbrew 3000, I extrapolate that, we will probably require about 1000 more contributors. Developers, you know what to do.

But for now, happy perlbrew-ing. 🍺

Written before YAPC::Hakodate. 2024/10/4, @gugod.