perl and perl module collide

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Dec 6, 2010, at 11:51 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
>> Of course, we should probably deprecate perl 5.8 ...
> 
> Our entire p5 ports tree is pretty much only tested with perl5.8, isn't it?

I haven't audited every port, but I've been using 5.10 almost since we first had a port for it with no problems. I'll be switching to 5.12 on all of my boxes pretty soon too.

Almost all of the p5 ports I've looked at don't have to do any special patching and just work with whatever perl you have installed.

Since they also have pretty good test coverage (thank you cpan!), it's not too hard to validate whether they should work or not with a new perl.

> Because that's still the default. I've seen several tickets about problems with p5 ports which were traced back to someone using perl5.10 or perl5.12.

Really? I've seen problems with perl5.8 a few times, but I haven't been paying really close attention. We should look at any of those issues to see if we can prevent them from being a problem when we change which is default.

> I'd love to get updated to a newer perl in MacPorts, on principle, but I don't know how smooth that's going to be.

Well, all of the p5 ports would need a revbump - people who installed things via cpan will probably be confused as their new perl won't have those modules, and there's a very small possibility that someone has things that depend on behavior that has changed in newer perl.

It's probably not going to get easier to deal with if we just continue to not do anything about it, though.

Maybe the people who are maintaining the current perl ports have thought about it some more.
--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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