Migrating to Perl 5.20/5.22

[David Evans]

Daniel, I agree with most of what you say.  Just a few clarifications 
and I'll be quiet,.

On 7/14/15 2:39 PM, Daniel J. Luke 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.
Upstream's statement is that the core Perl (including the core modules) 
is stable.  The status of all other modules is up to the individual 
maintainers and is indeterminate.
> traditionally, we find out when things break by people complaining - as a project we don’t do a lot of proactive testing.
True.  I have always hoped we could set our sights a bit higher.  I 
think this practice diminishes MacPort's reputation for delivering 
reliable ports.
> We should probably get out of the business of perl module portfiles 
> entirely, too.
I really agree with this.  I would vote to limit our port coverage to 
just those that are needed to support our other (non-perl) ports.  
Beyond that
CPAN, perlbrew, etc are there to pick up the slack. And the issue of 
module maintenance can then be pushed back to the upstream developers
where it belongs.
> I’m not volunteering to do this work, so I guess if you’re willing to 
> do it - go for it.
I don't think many would.
> 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.
Yes, given our lack of resouces it's probably all we can do.

I think this covers most issues of concern.  Let's not make a long drawn 
out discussion of this but make a decision and go.  If that seems 
infeasible, I would suggest we ask the Macports managers to take it 
under advisement and point us in an official direction.

Dave