perl5.20

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Jul 22, 2014, at 3:50 PM, Frank Schima <mf2k at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> On Jul 22, 2014, at 11:37 AM, Daniel J. Luke <dluke at geeklair.net> wrote:
>> So here's my short proposal:
>> 
>> 1. switch the perl5 port to actually install perl5.20.x
>> 2. deprecate and remove the other perl5.x ports
>> 3. change the perl5 portgroup to just build/install p5 ports that work with whatever we install as perl5 (currently 5.20.x)
>> 4. Update other ports to depend on the p5- module(s) and the perl5 port
>> 5. Make some way to (easily) force rebuilds of all p5 ports when there's a new release of perl5.x.y (probably on both new .x.0 and .x.y releases)
>> * one thing I thought might work would be to [ab]use epoch by setting it to the YYYYMMDD of the perl5 release in the perl5 portgroup (so individual ports can still update it to a newer epoch if needed, and we can keep bumping it for every perl5 version). I haven't though about it too much or tested it yet, though.
> 
> While I’m all for getting perl 5.20 up to speed on Macports, I’m against removing perl 5.16 or perl 5.18. I have been testing a number of p5 ports with perl 5.18 and only 1 of them failed to build for me. But it is an important one. The port is p5(.18)-pdl and it is needed for the demeter/demeter-devel ports.

PDL appears to build fine with perl 5.20

http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=PDL+2.007

I just built it against my perlbrew-managed perl5.20 on Mac OS X 10.9 and it passed its test suite [I didn't install all of the optional dependencies - one or more of which likely are causing the build problem(s) you're seeing].

> Given that we cannot yet build any p5.20 ports,

which would be fixed by reverting the previous change (installing stuff in to 5.20.x/ by default instead of 5.20/) - which was in itself an attempt to make #5 less necessary.

> I think it is way too early to be switching to it by default. Much less the only option. So I vote we at least keep perl 5.16 and perl 5.18 and all of their modules around for a while.  

only perl5.18 currently has a maintainer in MacPorts.

upstream has perl5.18 in maintenance mode, and recommends installing perl5.20 (previous perl5.x versions are all End of life).
--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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