Migrating to Perl 5.20/5.22

[Daniel J. Luke]

> On Jul 14, 2015, at 12:22 PM, David Evans <devans at macports.org> wrote:
> My point in being cautious has to do with fact that perl5.22 has just recently been released as the latest stable version.  

this is criteria we don’t have in general for any other ports.

If upstream says it’s stable, it’s what we provide in almost all cases.

> I have confidence in perl5.22
> itself but the fact that it is stable says nothing about whether the various Perl modules work with it properly.  

traditionally, we find out when things break by people complaining - as a project we don’t do a lot of proactive testing.

> They are completely untested on Macports
> with respect to this version other than to say that they build. Because of the apathy towards supporting Perl modules, in general, by the MacPorts maintainer community (952/1373 modules are nomaintainer), the only time modules actually get tested is when they are updated.  Maybe.
> 
> And this testing is really cursory.

we should set up something to run the automated test suite included with almost every module.

We should probably get out of the business of perl module portfiles entirely, too.

> I am concerned that switching to perl5.22 immediately will inevitably cause unexpected consequences in terms of module useability.

most things will probably work, some things are probably already broken, anything remaining is somewhat reasonable to fix as people report it.

> My compromise proposal is to switch to perl5.20 as the default now and drop all Perl versions except perl5.20 and perl5.22.  Then plan to drop perl5.20
> in say three to six months, after there is time for upstream module maintainers to address remaining perl5.22 issues, and leave perl5.22 as the sole Perl version supported.  

I’m not volunteering to do this work, so I guess if you’re willing to do it - go for it.

> After that, update the sole Perl port not at the time of the next stable period, but, again, 3 to 6 months thereafter for the same reasons.

I would strongly recommend we don’t add lag time here - just update the perl port once its released and update/patch modules if they turn out to be broken. Module authors/people who use the modules have some responsibility to keep their module maintained.

> An ongoing program of testing existing modules against the current unstable Perl version would be a further improvement in quality control/assurance but I doubt we have the interest or manpower available to do it.

I believe cpan already does automated test suite runs of several versions of perl on several OSes for modules - no need for us to duplicate that.

> Enough discussion.  Let's make a decision and get on with it.

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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