perl (again)

[Frank Schima]

On Jun 8, 2014, at 8:26 PM, Daniel J. Luke <dluke at geeklair.net> wrote:

> so, perl5.20 is out (and the new/current latest stable version)...
> 
> any chance we can get a little less crazy and just ship the 'current' perl (instead of being perpetually behind)?

The current issues are:

1. We need a perl5.20 port. Difficulty: ? 

It would be really nice if the perl5.X ports could be merged into a single Portfile with subports so that new perl versions would be relatively easy to add. All of the current perl ports seem to be different enough that I don’t understand what is required for perl5.20. 

2. The perl5 and intltool ports need a perl5_20 variant added. Difficulty: Easy 

3. All of the p5-* ports need to be updated to add 5.20 to the perl5.branches line. Difficulty: Hard

We have barely made a dent adding p5.18 subports. It would be much better if the perl5 portgroup simply always added p5-* subports up to 5.20. Individual portfiles could override that if some perl versions do not work. Checking and adding p5.20 to each p5-* port seems like an insurmountable goal, certainly in the short-term. The only way to do that would be to globally add it to every p5-* port without testing. At that point, we should simply add it to the perl5 portgroup. Given that all p5-* Portfiles have the perl5.branches line, I think it should be removed from all of them globally. But then we have the issue of notifying maintainers first. Having the perl5 portgroup add new perl versions seems to me to be the only way we are ever going to stay current with perl versions. 

$ port list p5.18-* | wc -l
      96
$ port list p5.16-* | wc -l
    1027
$ port list p5.12-* | wc -l
    1028

The biggest thing we have going for us is that most of the perl ports are not maintained. At the same time, no one is doing much about the perl issue in Macports and that’s why it is behind the current version. 


Cheers!
Frank

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