Error trying to upgrade Perl 5.10

[Brandon Allbery]

On Jan 26, 2010, at 23:00 , Eric Hall wrote:
> 	I have not checked that all perl-using ports depend
> on 'perl5' (w/o a version), though I did notice at least one
> port (ghc) is set to require perl5.8 as
>
> 	"only perl 5.8 is known to work reliably."
> 	
> 	I don't know if that is out of date or not.


Still true, and unlikely to be fixed; GHC 6.10 and later have  
deprecated the C-based code generator, and the hairy perl5.8-based  
assembler postprocessor (appropriately named the Evil Mangler) that  
does some highly custom optimization for it.  Nobody's willing to try  
to figure out which bits of evil don't work with perl 5.10, or how to  
fix them without disrupting other things; the Evil Mangler is  
bitrotted spaghetti code of the worst kind, and much of the impetus  
for switching to native code generation was getting rid of it.

I don't know if it would be reasonable to drop the perl 5.8  
requirement for the 6.12 series (thereby breaking registerised -fvia-C  
compilation); 6.12.1 is out but not recommended for use yet because  
many of the "platform" libraries aren't compatible with it yet (and it  
has some 64-bit issues on OSX that need to be worked around).

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH



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