perl5.20

[Frank Schima]

On Jul 22, 2014, at 3:25 PM, David Evans <devans at macports.org> wrote:

> On 7/22/14 1:01 PM, Daniel J. Luke wrote:
>>> 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).
> We have two topics going here:
> 
>  1) trimming old/outdated/unsupported perl ports
>  2) what to do about Mojca's commit that broke perl5.20 builds
> 
> I suggest we do the following:
> 
>  * agree on which old perl5 ports can be dispensed with.  Looks like we
> can agree at this point on removing anything older than perl5.16 as a
> starting point.  I tend to support inclusion of perl5.16 for now because
> it is the only recent version that has good port coverage.  (Of a total
> of 1045 ports, 1042 support perl5.16, 137 perl5.18, 10 perl5.20).  This
> amounts to current version, last version and most recent EOL version.
> 
>  * revert as soon as possible Mojca's recent commit that broke perl5.20
> builds until the there has been more discussion and the
> details/consequences worked out.  This is no comment about the merit of
> his suggestion, just that it breaks things.  If he would set up a
> separate test branch, I would be happy to help test.  This would allow
> progress on adding perl5.20 ports.
> 
>  * work toward filling out perl5.18 and perl5.20 ports with the goal of
> moving to a more recent default version as soon as coverage permits.  If
> you're going to add a perl5.18 subport, add the perl5.20 as well so it
> doesn't have to be done twice.
> 
> Just some broad strokes but it would be nice to come to an agreement
> that would allow us to move forward.  Comments?

I completely agree with this approach. I have a bunch of p5 port changes ready to commit, but I wanted to test the p5.20 versions first to see if they at least build. 

We still have a number of ports that require perl 5.12 right now however. So we may not be able to remove that yet. I will try to file a ticket about this soon if one has not been created (I forget at this point). 

BTW, Mojca is a “she”. :)


Cheers!
Frank