Migrating to Perl 5.20/5.22

[Mark Anderson]

I second perl 5.22. And that we should only support the latest perl.

—Mark
_______________________
Mark E. Anderson <emer at emer.net>

On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 5:39 PM, Daniel J. Luke <dluke at geeklair.net> wrote:

> > 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
> +========================================================+
> | *---------------- dluke at geeklair.net ----------------* |
> | *-------------- http://www.geeklair.net -------------* |
> +========================================================+
> |   Opinions expressed are mine and do not necessarily   |
> |          reflect the opinions of my employer.          |
> +========================================================+
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> macports-dev mailing list
> macports-dev at lists.macosforge.org
> https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/attachments/20150714/a2c171dc/attachment.html>