perl5 default version

[Joshua Root]

On 2022-7-5 22:54 , Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I would like to clarify a few points before being able to proceed:
> 
> #1
> Some ports are probably not yet handling perl correctly in the sense
> that they might have been built on the buildbot and keep depending on
> modules from perl5.28, while the user only has perl5.34 installed.
> Will something bad happen if I remove the +perl5_28 variant from the
> perl5 port before those ports are "fixed"? I would just like to know
> if I can merge https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/15264
> as is or if I need to wait with variant removal a bit longer (if I
> need to remove one commit from the PR).

Yes, something bad will happen: the affected ports won't run for most 
users who install them after the change. However, that already happened 
before for any user who had perl5 installed with a non-default variant, 
and will be happening more since my PR changing the default variant was 
merged. Removing the perl5_28 variant will unhide the problem for the 
final segment of users (those who already have perl5 installed with the 
old default variant).

> #2
> Let's assume there's an average port that doesn't care which version
> of perl is being used, but that port has a bunch of dependencies on
> various perl modules (so when perl is upgraded, at least a revbump is
> needed). What syntax should we use?
> 
> (a) Some ports use
>      set perl_branch 5.34
>      depends_build port:p${perl_branch}-xml-parser
> The advantage is that a portgroup isn't needed, but one cannot use
> ${perl5.bin} if needed, for example.
> 
> (b) Other ports use
>      PortGroup perl5 1.0
>      perl5.branches 5.34
>      depends_build port:p${perl5.major}-xml-parser
> 
> (c) Yet other ports use
>      PortGroup perl5 1.0
>      perl5.major 5.34
>      depends_build port:p${perl5.major}-xml-parser
> 
> Can we agree which syntax is best (b, c, something else, ...)? Some
> maintainers argued that including the PortGroup sounded like an
> overkill, but it would be of enormous help if we could identify all
> relevant ports with some simple grepp-ing in the future, and having
> ports use "perl5.branches", "perl5.major", "perl_branch", "pbranch",
> "perlver", ... tons of other variable names as well as hardcoded perl
> versions etc. isn't exactly helping.

My vote would be the maintainer's choice of (a) or (c), but always using 
perl5.major as the variable name in the (a) case.

- Josh