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

[Dan Ports]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 09:00:09AM +0200, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 11:25 PM, Dan Ports wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> But it will only save work if we approach this properly. If we would
> simply decide to use a single perl *now*, we would still need to
> modify all the > 1000 ports and there would be no easy workaround for
> broken modules (like p5-wx etc.). So without some extra work and as
> things stand now, support for a single Perl version wouldn't really
> solve anything.

I don't think there's any getting around the fact that a major version
update to perl is going to involve a non-trivial amount of work. It's
almost certainly going to involve touching a large number of p5- ports
-- although hopefully that can be kept to a straightforward, scriptable
revbump -- and dealing with a few legitimate compatibility issues.

I'm more concerned about the impact on the many other ports that rely
on perl in some way or another. As it is now, we've got to update the
version of perl used by many ports, and we still have quite a few that
are using p5.12 (cf. #44405).

There is also the issue that ports need to patch various components to
make sure they're using the right path to the right version of perl,
even hidden dependencies through things like build scripts and
intltool. I don't have much confidence that we've gotten that right,
and I doubt many of the configurations that are currently possible are
actually tested.

So that leaves me thinking we'd have an overall more reliable and
easier to maintain system with only one perl. If there were a strong
reason in favor of having multiple perls, it might be worth it, but I
haven't heard much argument in that favor.

Dan

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