Fwd: Re: "Perl meeting" over IRC

[David Evans]

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Date: 	Fri, 27 Feb 2015 12:21:03 -0800
From: 	David Evans <devans at macports.org>
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To: 	Mojca Miklavec <mojca at macports.org>, Lawrence Velázquez 
<larryv at macports.org>, Clemens Lang <cal at macports.org>, Ryan Schmidt 
<ryandesign at macports.org>, Frank Schima <mf2k at macports.org>, Bradley 
Giesbrecht <pixilla at macports.org>, Daniel J. Luke <dluke at geeklair.net>, 
Kurt Hindenburg <khindenburg at macports.org>, blair at macports.org, 
hum at macports.org, nottwo at macports.org, Jeremy Lavergne 
<snc at macports.org>, takanori at macports.org
CC: 	MacPorts Dev <macports-dev at lists.macosforge.org>
Subject: 	Re: "Perl meeting" over IRC
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On 2/27/15 1:14 AM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I believe we should pick a suitable time and announce some kind of
> "Perl working group" meeting over IRC on the dev mailing list.
>
> We really should start sorting things out. An amazing amount of work
> has already been done recently by David, but there's another huge
> portion of work still left to be done.
>
> One thing that's certainly not clear to me is how to replace "perl5
> +perl5_16" with "perl +perl5_20" and how to deal with a large number
> of ports that still rely on the fact that "perl" is "perl5.16" etc.
>
> Ideas? Plans? Schedule preferences?
>
> Mojca
>
A necessary prerequisite to  forming such a group, much less undertake
any further heavy work on the perl ports, is to get a firm commitment
from existing committers to participate in a serious way.  I would like
to see a group of at least 5 and preferably 10 or more committers who
are willing to make such a commitment.  Without this, I don't see that
we can proceed much further.

I've expanded the addressee list of this message to include current
committers who are listed of maintainers of at least one perl port and
the devel list as well so as to not exclude anyone who would like to
participate. Apologies if I have left anyone out.

I would ask anyone who is interested in the future of the MacPorts perl
ports and who would be willing to donate a definite portion of their
available effort to actively maintaining them to so indicate by
responding to this message.

Once we have a suitable critical mass,  I would propose that the next
prerequisite to holding a formal meeting would be to assemble an agenda
of items so be discussed so that participants can come to the meeting
with some preparation.

Issues that I would like to see discussed are as follows:

* How much effort do we realistically have to spend on perl?  How much
interest/demand is there?

*  Should we continue to support multiple perl versions or should we
follow the lead of most other distributions and limit ourselves to one
currently supported version of perl.  dluke is a proponent of this the
one-perl approach and I believe it has some merit considering the lack
of committed manpower to maintain multiple perl versions.

*  What perl versions should be considered current?  When can a newly
released perl version be considered stable enough to support? How often
should the default perl version be updated? Should we provide support
for development versions?

*  What current problems exist in the current set of perl ports that
should be addressed before moving on to a new default perl version?

* What are the issues involved with moving to a new default perl version
and how can they be managed to avoid breakage of the publicly available
set of perl ports during the migration process?

I am sure that there are many other issues in people's minds. Please add
your input to this list.   With definite answers to questions like
these, I believe we can be in a position to form a definite step by step
plan for moving forward.

Dave Evans












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