perl5, perl5.* changes

[Arno Hautala]

On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 15:02, Daniel J. Luke <dluke at geeklair.net> wrote:
>
> If you've got ideas (or code) for how to help make things better, I'm sure people would be happy :)

I think some of the issue is the way that the default was changed.

Previously perl 5.8 was the default and 5.10 and 5.12 were available
as variants. The new default is 5.12 with variants for all three
options. Those who want to stick with 5.8 need to recognize that a
change is being made and specifically add the 5.8 variant. This kind
of breaks the convenience provided by a wrapper / proxy port.

I think a cleaner transition would have been to add the 5.8 variant,
set it as default (essentially no change from the previous behavior),
and then wait some number of weeks before changing the default variant
to 5.12. This way, most users would already be on the 5.8 variant and
would not be affected by the change in defaults.

Personally, I'm not sure I'm ready to move to 5.12 (I need to
recompile all my installed p5 modules and test a few scripts), so I've
resolved things on my side by correcting my "broken" perl5 install
with perl5+perl5_8.

At least, that's my take.

-- 
arno  s  hautala    /-|   arno at alum.wpi.edu

pgp b2c9d448