Some perl5 history (was Re: Fading zmq20)

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Feb 15, 2012, at 11:59 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> We shouldn't repeat the "perl5" antipattern any further. Perl should have been using "port select" all along; I don't know why it never did.

originally there was just a perl5 port, which was (probably) intended to be the 'best' perl5 version and just update like any other normal port.

Unfortunately, you (usually) have to rebuild any perl modules you are using when you upgrade perl (this is an oversimplification because the details aren't important here).

Since macports doesn't have a good way of handling this (and no one wanted to revbump all of the p5 ports for each release), and we wanted to make the user experience good (and eventually people thought it would be useful to have multiple perl5 versions installed), we ended up with the current situation.

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
+========================================================+                        
| *---------------- dluke at geeklair.net ----------------* |                          
| *-------------- http://www.geeklair.net -------------* |                          
+========================================================+                        
|   Opinions expressed are mine and do not necessarily   |                          
|          reflect the opinions of my employer.          |                          
+========================================================+