RFC: changing default perl to perl5.14

[Dan Ports]

On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 05:36:26PM -0800, Dan Ports wrote:
> Just about every perl port runs into this one. We probably want to have
> them either install manpages into separate directories or include a
> version in the name. (I think the former is better if we can get the
> manpath set up correctly, but I haven't thought too hard about it.)

Hmm, actually, can we do this as simply as changing (for example)
perl5.12's man3ext in configure.args from '3pm' to '3pm512'? I've only
given this the most cursory of tests, but it seems like it will work.

(plus some tweaking to the perl5.* and perl5 ports for the manpages
installed by the perl interpreter itself, since there's already some
filename mangling to avoid conflicts going on there.)

> A second problem is that some perl ports install binaries into
> $prefix/bin, e.g. both p5.12- and p5.14-libwww-perl will try to install
> /opt/local/bin/lwp-download. This isn't as common as the manpage
> problem, but it still affects a decent number of ports.

I'm not sure whether it's better to try to automatically add a version
suffix to binaries (cf. python.link_binaries_suffix) or handle this on
a case-by-case basis. There are at least a few common ports that run
into this conflict. (p5.x-module-corelist seems to be a common
dependency).

If we can get these conflicts sorted out, there shouldn't be any
problem changing default perl dependencies to 5.14, but I don't think
we should before then.

Dan

-- 
Dan R. K. Ports              MIT CSAIL                http://drkp.net/