Removal of perl 5.20

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hi,

First of all thanks to everyone involved in the process ... we have
made a successful transition to 5.22. As expected it took us 6 months
again, so I'm glad that we didn't start switching to 5.20 which would
require us to repeat the exercise again (for another 6 months?).
Thanks again to everyone for your contributions and I sincerely
apologise if I made some mistakes along the way.

Now we have to remove old perl branches both in ports providing
+perl5_16 as well as for p5.16-foo. I would certainly like to remove
support for 5.16 and 5.18. I'm not yet sure about 5.20, but I'm in
favour of removing support for Perl 5.20 as well unless there are
known problems.

Question(s):

** Does anyone know for any reason to keep the branch for 5.20 alive
or can we remove support for 5.20 as well? Should we perhaps wait a
bit longer to see if any new issues show up before removing support
for 5.20 and if so: for how long?

(By the time we finish that, 5.24 might be out anyway, so we'll soon
end up with two branches again.)

See
    http://trac.macports.org/ticket/50245

N.B.: Please note that we are not discussing any major changes in
packaging of Perl yet. Please make suggestions and discuss about
changes in:
    http://trac.macports.org/ticket/50000
This particular question is just about getting your opinion about
removal of support for perl 5.20. The perl5.20 port would stay, only
modules and branches would go.

Mojca


(Was: Migrating to Perl 5.20/5.22)

On 14 July 2015 at 11:37, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The modules for Perl 5.20 and 5.22 are basically ready by now (and
> thanks to David nearly all are also up-to-date). They haven't
> undergone much testing, but there is no way we can do extensive
> testing on 1000++ modules.
>
> We should start migrating other ports that depend on Perl to a newer
> version of Perl, but the question is: should we go to 5.22 or 5.20?
> David proposed to go to 5.20 because 5.22 might be too new and not so
> well tested yet.
>
> But my fear is that given how much time it takes us to do the
> migration, 5.20 might become unsupported by the time we finish the
> transition and then we'll have to start it all over again to the new
> version (5.22 or maybe ever 5.24 by then). If Perl 5.22 doesn't work
> for some ports, they could go for 5.20 (or an earlier version for that
> matter) or wait until a particular problem gets resolved. Once all
> ports migrate off 5.16, we could do an automatic upgrade from 5.16 to
> 5.2x.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Mojca