randomly bumping things to require perl 5.30 vs 5.28 requires everyone to have both installed ...

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Jun 22, 2020, at 10:59 AM, Ken Cunningham <ken.cunningham.webuse at gmail.com> wrote:
> Perhaps unavoidable in some cases, but if you look around the web, this is in fact the #1 complaint about MacPorts: bloat.

It's somewhat ironic given the current trend of everything being containerized (and bringing in all of their duplicate dependencies inside their containers)>

> It might be an idea for the admins to "set" the perl version all ports will use (barring some actual real need for another), and then --- all-at-once -- change it to some new version to avoid this.
> 
> And ideally we could look at changing it once every few years.

We should just have one perl5 port that tracks the current release. We'd just need to either revbump everything that needs a rebuild when a new minor perl version comes out (all the p5- ports to start) OR some enhancement to base to make it so the revbump is unnecessary.

We could keep the 'old' perl5s around - but I would suggest that it's not worthwhile. People who really need multiple versions of perl are better served by using perlbrew than any of the packagers.

-- 
Daniel J. Luke