perl5, perl5.* changes

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Feb 26, 2011, at 8:48 PM, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> 
>> There may be a case for keeping perl5 around once perl6 appears (if
>> ever) - but I don't know of any reasons to keep 5.8 around.
> 
> AFAIK, Perl6 is a completely different and incompatible language
> (unless the Perl6 interpreter can detect Perl5 scripts and convert
> them on the fly). So, one would need to keep both perl5 and perl6
> for many years.

Perl6 isn't really 'real' yet. I think the eventual interpreter is supposed to be backwards compatible with perl5 scripts, but we won't really know how true that's going to be until (unless?) perl6 development gets further along.

>> People who have stuff that they want to test before upgrading to a
>> newer perl would still have that option.
> 
> There's the same kind of risks with libraries (and this is even worse,
> as some libraries tend to be less stable, from the API point of view,
> than Perl).

Yep.

There is some risk that updated modules and updated behavior will cause problems, but in practice there aren't that many issues (I've moved rather large codebases from perl5.6 to perl5.12 without difficulty).

> Still, there is only one version of a given library in
> MacPorts.

For some libraries, we keep old and new ABI versions around, but in general I think we try to avoid it.

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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