is freebsd on drugs?

Gabor recenly posted some reports about what version of what CPAN dists were in what OS distributions.

I thought I’d have a look at one of the clusters of modules I maintain in the Email:: namespace. I headed to the E section and I saw something bizarre. Why does FreeBSD change so many version numbers? Email-FolderType is distributed as 0.8.12 instead of 0.812. Does that mean they only use X.Y.ZZZ? No, because Email-Folder 0.852 is distributed as 0.85.2. Does that mean they just require some form of three-part version? I don’t think so, since Email-MIME 1.855 is distributed as 1.855.

Can someone tell me what the hell they’re doing?

Written on May 1, 2007