perl (again)

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Jun 11, 2014, at 4:44 AM, Mojca Miklavec <mojca at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 1:49 AM, Mark Anderson wrote:
>> I sadly have not had enough time to work on cpan-mp, I've been mostly
>> learning the internals of macports first. But yeah, like I said on that
>> other thread, the latest perl is enough. Back when 5.x stalled because
>> everyone thought 6 was coming out it was ok to stay still. But now we get
>> new Perls regularly.
> 
> There's probably nothing wrong with providing just the latest version
> of Perl, but in order to do that one has to fix 1000+ packages and/or
> properly implement the cpan2mp functionality (and redesign the
> packages) before this can be done.

why? it's not worse that what we have now (which is really the same set of problems multiplied by the number of different perls we have + the explosion of +perlX.Y variants that other ports need to support having different perls installed).

> There is one thing I fear a bit though if there was really just a
> single version supported: nobody would dare to upgrade perl when a new
> release comes out. And the upgrade scenario needs to be really well
> thought-out in advance, as well as a chance to test pre-releases
> locally (let's say an easy way for any macports user to switch to Perl
> 2.21 and keep everything working properly).

I'll assume you mean 5.21, not 2.21 (and that by 5.21 you really mean 5.22)

I just did a perl upgrade on a few (production) machines (perl 5.18 to perl 5.20 via perlbrew) and it went relatively smoothly - there were a couple of modules that I did have to track down patches for, but nothing major (in fact, almost everything built just fine, but a couple of things needed patches to pass their test suites - but of course my set of installed modules might be vastly different from other people's). Being able to stage/revert is important.

As things are now, it's a pain to move from one perl version to another because you have to install the new perl (and maybe reinstall the perl5 port to get symlinks that make you happy), generate a list of installed perl modules, install new versions of those perl modules (assuming they've all been updated to include the new perl and they all use the perl5 portgroup).

It would be /much/ nicer if you could just do port upgrade outdated and have macports install a new perl and rebuild all of the perl modules you had installed for the new perl. Maybe it would be possible for MP (or one of us) to set up a build machine that would just run through the new perl and all of the perl modules before we commit a major upgrade (giving us at least a list of the modules that fail and need attention).

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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