[enhancement] proposal - make all ports independent of which version of Perl is installed or the major one

[Bjarne D Mathiesen]

Lawrence Velázquez wrote:
> On May 15, 2012, at 6:35 p.m., Bjarne D Mathiesen wrote:
> 
>> Daniel J. Luke wrote:
>>> On May 15, 2012, at 6:09 PM, Bjarne D Mathiesen wrote:
>>>> ports can be made independent of which version of Perl is installed or
>>>> the major one by
>>>
>>>
>>> In my opinion, we would be better served by just choosing one version of perl (which would be 5.14 right now) as our 'perl', and possibly offering older versions as options (although I don't think it's really necessary).
>>
>> That doesn't fix the problem with the hardcoding of p5.12 and perl5.12
>>
>> We would still have to go through all ports and replace instances of
>> 	p5.12    -> p5.14
>> 	perl5.12 -> perl5.14
>>
>> And what happens when we get to Perl6 ??? or Perl 5.16 , 5.18 ...
> 
> 
> The idea would be that we'd only have one "perl" port. All modules requiring Perl would have a dependency on that single port.
> 

This is a bit of the same discussion we have with:
	mysql
	apache2

For mysql, we've chosen to have several versions that can live
independtly of each other and be installed at the same time:
	mysql51
	mysql55
as well as the alternatives mariadb & percona

For apache2, the idea is to
	retire apache20
	transision apache2 @2.2.x to apache2 @2.4.x
thus only having a single maintained version in ports

For mysql and other ports, we are using the select system.
For Perl we are using a completely other system

One idea might be to first of all transition Perl to using the select
system. I can see some point in the future where we might want to keep
at least two version of Perl that can live on the system and work
independently of each other : as I understand it, Perl6 is a major
revision that breaks significantly with Perl5

-- 
Bjarne D Mathiesen
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