Re: [MacPorts] #50062: perl5.22 does not “replace” perl5.14!!

[MacPorts]

#50062: perl5.22 does not “replace” perl5.14!!
-----------------------------+--------------------------------
  Reporter:  felipe@…        |      Owner:  macports-tickets@…
      Type:  enhancement     |     Status:  closed
  Priority:  Normal          |  Milestone:
 Component:  ports           |    Version:
Resolution:  wontfix         |   Keywords:
      Port:  perl5 perl5.14  |
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Comment (by mojca@…):

 Just a (not-so)short reply.

 There is/was no technical problem or reason for removal of these ports.
 The only maintenance problem was keeping all the modules. Keeping just the
 interpreter wasn't really problematic (even though it make Perl less
 usable without those modules).

 We ship many other software packages that only come at a fixed version and
 get updated on a regular basis, so that there is no way of going back. You
 can't compile your documents with TeX Live 2012, even though that might
 give you different result from TeX Live 2015 for example. You cannot
 switch to an older version of `libpng`, `subversion` (name any other
 software for that matter). We also removed `python24`, `python25`,
 `python30`, `python31`, ... `clang` up to version 3.2. (On the other hand
 we keep `gcc43`, Apache 1 and a zillion of other outdated and unmaintained
 packages that nobody even notices are still there and completely broken.)

 So at some point certain decisions have to be made: whether or not to keep
 an old software around. Keeping an old version of Perl is hardly of
 interest to an average user, but I imagine there are developers who might
 want to test their packages against different versions of Perl. If nothing
 else, if they want to support older versions of (system) Perl on Mac OS X,
 it might be handy to be able to test whether something works or not.

 For those users there are currently two options:
   * install Perl from a different source (either from source or from a
 binary package)
   * create a local repository and fetch the old `Portfile`s from MacPorts'
 SVN:
 {{{
 svn co
 https://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/trunk/dports/lang/perl5.14@131310
 }}}
 (or hypothetically get a vote from more users & developers who would agree
 that keeping those old versions around would be beneficial for the
 community).

 If the ports are of benefit to a single user, it might be best to do a
 checkout from SVN. If there is a large group of users who desperately need
 these old versions, one could discuss that on the user mailing list.

 An alternative would be to create a "graveyard" with outdated ports (such
 as Perl 5.8, Apache 1, GCC 4.3, python 2.4, Qt 3, wxWidgets 2.8) that
 wouldn't be included in the distribution and wouldn't generally be
 maintained, but so that users could easily use them (at their own risk),
 in a similar way as HomeBrew provides add-on packages in separate
 repositories (scientific package, ...)

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.macports.org/ticket/50062#comment:4>
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