Moving to One Perl

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Sep 16, 2014, at 9:52 PM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 
>> I would suggest that we just remove all of the p5-xx ports.
> 
> Why? Because one of the features we have advertised to users, and which they rely on, is that they can run "sudo port selfupdate" and "port outdated" and see which ports are outdated -- which ones have never versions available -- and run "sudo port upgrade outdated" to receive those updates.

meh

when we move from one default perl5 to a new default perl5, we don't upgrade people to the new perl...

I see there being a tradeoff here - apparently no one wants to do the work to make the 'smooth transition' possible (although I haven't looked at it too much yet, and maybe it's not as hard as it is being made out to be), but the current situation is a ballooning disaster (we just get more and more perl versions and more and more p5 port versions).

> If we just remove the p5.XX-YY ports (in other words, if we just remove the logic from the perl5 portgroup that causes those subports to be created), then users who have any of those subports installed will never know if and when they become outdated.

We can put some notes in with instructions (as a minimum). Maybe a transition script that takes the port obsolete data and uses it to select appropriate p5-foo ports? Maybe some enhancement to base? Maybe something else.

I think I'll create a branch and start with the basic perl5 changes, and see how much work it would/will be to do the other stuff (and anyone who is interested in assisting can also try out ideas).

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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