NAME

       Moose::Manual::Support - Policies regarding support, releases, and compatibility.

VERSION

       version 2.1005

SUPPORT POLICY

       There are two principles to Moose's policy of supported behavior.

       1.  Moose favors correctness over everything.

       2.  Moose supports documented and tested behavior, not accidental behavior or side
           effects.

       If a behavior has never been documented or tested, the behavior is officially undefined.
       Relying upon undocumented and untested behavior is done at your own risk.

       If a behavior is documented or tested but found to be incorrect later, the behavior will
       go through a deprecation period. During the deprecation period, use of that feature will
       cause a warning. Eventually, the deprecated feature will be removed.

       In some cases, it is not possible to deprecate a behavior. In this case, the behavior will
       simply be changed in a major release.

RELEASE SCHEDULE

       Moose is on a system of quarterly major releases, with minor releases as needed between
       major releases. A minor release is defined as one that makes every attempt to preserve
       backwards compatibility. Currently this means that we did not introduce any new dependency
       conflicts, and that we did not make any changes to documented or tested behavior (this
       typically means that minor releases will not change any existing tests in the test suite,
       although they can add new ones). A minor release can include new features and bug fixes.

       Major releases may be backwards incompatible. Moose prioritizes correctness over backwards
       compatibility or performance; see the DEPRECATION POLICY to understand how backwards
       incompatible changes are announced.

       Major releases are scheduled to happen during fixed release windows. If the window is
       missed, then there will not be a major release until the next release window. The release
       windows are one month long, and occur during the months of January, April, July, and
       October.

       Before a major release, a series of development releases will be made so that users can
       test the upcoming major release before it is distributed to CPAN. It is in the best
       interests of everyone involved if these releases are tested as widely as possible.

DEPRECATION POLICY

       Moose has always prioritized correctness over performance and backwards compatibility.

       Major deprecations or API changes are documented in the Changes file as well as in
       Moose::Manual::Delta. The Moose developers will also make an effort to warn users of
       upcoming deprecations and breakage through the Moose blog (http://blog.moose.perl.org).

       Deprecated APIs will be preserved for at least one year after the major release which
       deprecates that API. Deprecated APIs will only be removed in a major release.

       Moose will also warn during installation if the version of Moose being installed will
       break an installed dependency. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the Perl install
       process these warnings may be easy to miss.

BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY

       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".

VERSION NUMBERS

       Moose version numbers consist of three parts, in the form X.YYZZ. The X is the "special
       magic number" that only gets changed for really big changes. Think of this as being like
       the "5" in Perl 5.12.1.

       The YY portion is the major version number. Moose uses even numbers for stable releases,
       and odd numbers for trial releases. The ZZ is the minor version, and it simply increases
       monotonically. It starts at "00" each time a new major version is released.

       Semantically, this means that any two releases which share a major version should be API-
       compatible with each other. In other words, 2.0200, 2.0201, and 2.0274 are all API-
       compatible.

       Prior to version 2.0, Moose version numbers were monotonically incrementing two decimal
       values (0.01, 0.02, ... 1.11, 1.12, etc.).

       Moose was declared production ready at version 0.18 (via
       <http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=608144>).

PERL VERSION COMPATIBILITY

       As of version 2.00, Moose officially supports being run on perl 5.8.3+. Our current policy
       is to support the earliest version of Perl shipped in the latest stable release of any
       major operating system (this tends to mean CentOS). We will provide at least six months
       notice (two major releases) when we decide to increase the officially supported Perl
       version. The next time this will happen is in January of 2012, when Moose 2.06 will
       increase the minimum officially supported Perl version to 5.10.1.

       "Officially supported" does not mean that these are the only versions of Perl that Moose
       will work with. Our declared perl dependency will remain at 5.8.3 as long as our test
       suite continues to pass on 5.8.3. What this does mean is that the core Moose dev team will
       not be spending any time fixing bugs on versions that aren't officially supported, and new
       contributions will not be rejected due to being incompatible with older versions of perl
       except in the most trivial of cases. We will, however, still welcome patches to make Moose
       compatible with earlier versions, if other people are still interested in maintaining
       compatibility. Note that although performance regressions are acceptable in order to
       maintain backwards compatibility (as long as they only affect the older versions),
       functionality changes and buggy behavior will not be. If it becomes impossible to provide
       identical functionality between modern Perl versions and unsupported Perl versions, we
       will increase our declared perl dependency instead.

CONTRIBUTING

       Moose has an open contribution policy. Anybody is welcome to submit a patch. Please see
       Moose::Manual::Contributing for more details.

AUTHOR

       Moose is maintained by the Moose Cabal, along with the help of many contributors. See
       "CABAL" in Moose and "CONTRIBUTORS" in Moose for details.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

       This software is copyright (c) 2013 by Infinity Interactive, Inc..

       This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as
       the Perl 5 programming language system itself.