ShipIt 0.60 is released, and it now supports — trial option to make a TRIAL release on CPAN.

TRIAL release is a (new) way to make a developer release on CPAN, without messing with the $VERSION string to contain “_”. You don’t need to deal with _ at all in the .pm files, Changes or anywhere. If you want to make a new developer release, just bump the version to a normal version (like 1.50), and run the shipit command with — trial option, and a tarball (distfile) is renamed to -1.50-TRIAL.tar.gz before being uploaded to PAUSE.

And that makes a developer release.

Please note that (because it might be a little confusing at first), -TRIAL doesn’t do anything with release candidates and such. You can’t release 2.0.0-TRIAL and then 2.0.0 later. Think 2.0.0-TRIAL the same thing as 2.0_0, but without _ mess in the .pm files and $VERSION.

You release 2.0.0-TRIAL, then the next non-trial version will be 2.0.1.

In other news, installing a developer (trial) release from CPAN will be a whole lot easier with upcoming cpanminus 1.6. And there will be a lot of great new features and fixes I’ve been putting, and you can see the preview on github.