perl (again)

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 8:37 PM, Daniel J. Luke wrote:
> On Jun 10, 2014, at 2:21 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>>
>> I would be really grateful if someone would be
>> willing to look into the above mentioned ticket. We would need a
>> slight modification of the configure/build scripts.
>
> That change seems reasonable to me, but it would be worthwhile to look at what other packaging systems do (and/or to follow ryan's advice and talk to the perl devs about it)

A while back I asked on stackoverflow and got a suggestion to install perlbrew.

(http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23270656/how-to-install-perl-without-sub-version-number-in-path-lib-perl5-5-x-y-lib)

But yes, we should ask that. (I nevertheless made a change in perl
5.20 to see how it works.)

>> Other questions are still open. (One of the "complaints" about the
>> current situation [ignoring the situation itself] is that if I go
>> ahead and start modifying maintained p5-foo ports, maintainers will
>> start complaining.
>
> I don't see that as a 'problem' (more works as intended) - you shouldn't make changes to a port someone else maintains without communicating with them (unless the port is 'broken').

Yes, I understand that. But in the context of perl ports this *is* a
problem. The only reasonable solution would be to open a ticket, CC
all maintainers of all thousand perl packages, ask them to fix/upgrade
their ports in the next 3-10 days (or argue why the ports shouldn't be
changed), and that all other ports could be changed based on
maintainer timeout at any time. Opening thousand tickets just to
request an update seems like an overkill.

(But yes, something needs to be done to facilitate automatic upgrades,
at least for ports where no special treatment is needed.)

> either we get the maintainers to update their ports, add openmaintainer, or we follow the port abandonment procedure and get the port updated to nomaintainer.

Or that.

> maybe eventually get some level 'automatic' support of modules from CPAN without having to write/update portfiles for each module when most of them will 'just work'?)

Yes, that would be ideal. It just needs work.

Btw: Perl 5.16 is no longer supported.

Mojca