Perl changes (+ please wait a bit with commits in perl modules if possible)

[Dan Ports]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 08:19:27AM -0700, David Evans wrote:
> As Daniel has said, no point in changing things that are going to go away so
> we need to get a consensus on where we want to go with this.  My input here
> would be this:
> 
> *  make the necessary changes to perl5.18 to work as perl5.20 does
> *  leave perl5.16 and lower alone for now
> *  update ports to support p5.18 & 5.20 unless there is strong sentiment
> to go to 5.20 ASAP.
>    not much difference in adding one or two new branches
> *  then decided which branches to remove, go to single perl (which has
> other consequences), etc.

This makes sense to me. I don't know enough about perl to comment
usefully on the subrelease path issue, so I'll leave that to people who
actually know what they're talking about.

I think it is worth adding support for p5.18 and 5.20 to the current
p5 ports since that doesn't seem terribly onerous -- especially if
Mojca has already written a patch :). And it'll give us a chance to see
if any of the existing perl modules have trouble building for
5.18/5.20.

Longer-term, we need to decide whether to go to a single perl.
Personally, I'm in favor of this. But it's clearly going to involve a
lot of work (even if it'll save us more in the long run) so we
shouldn't let that stop us from doing this now.

Dan

-- 
Dan R. K. Ports                UW CSE                http://drkp.net/