perl5.20

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Jul 19, 2014 1:15 AM, "David Evans" wrote:
> On 7/18/14 3:47 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>
> Well, I'm sorry but I don't really see the need for these experiments.

At the moment it is very inconvenient to upgrade perl from 5.x.y to
5.x.(y+1). A bunch of "random" ports become broken "just because" (because
they link against perl and location of a fully compatible libperl.dylib
changes for no good reason). One could fix those, but I'm sure that nobody
can tell which those ports are without a substantial amount of effort to
figure it out once. On top of that the Portfiles for Perl start getting
weird (because paths to old perl modules need to be added) and people tend
to forgot to fix the path. Paths where the modules are installed are also
unpredictable based on whether one installs from a "binary package" or from
source and based on when the module is installed.

> But I'm probably being dense.

No problem. I prefer discussion with good arguments rather than making
wrong decisions that need to be fixed later.

> What's the benefit of the change/the problem with the previous system.
> Why is a change necessary/desireable?
>
> Why can't the experiments be done in your test environment rather than
with
> live ports?

- I'm unable to test 1000 ports.

- I'm willing to test a bunch of ports, but once we add p5.20 it will be
very time consuming and a lot of mess to change things in *all* python
modules.

- I'm almost sure that hardly anyone will be willing to do any considerable
amount of testing, so it will boil down to max 5 people testing at the end
anyway and most bugs would surface later.

- There are plans to change the way how Perl and Perl modules are written
and installed, but we should continue updating ports until then. However
spending an enormous amount of time changing and fixing a large number of
ports would be almost a wasted effort (given that most of the work done now
will be thrown away anyway).
> But I do point out that perl 5.20 is the current stable release

And we didn't even port any noticable amount of ports to 5.18, let alone
make 5.18 the default perl version.

Mojca
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