perl5, perl5.* changes

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Feb 26, 2011, at 10:03 PM, Arno Hautala wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 16:47, Daniel J. Luke <dluke at geeklair.net> wrote:
>> My personal opinion is that we shouldn't bother with the 5.x ports. We should have moved perl5 from 5.8 to 5.10 to 5.12 and just rev-bumped the p5 ports when the changes were made ...
> 
> This sounds pretty sane. Are there any reports of any modules breaking
> within the 5 series?

You run newer modules (core modules, at least) with newer perl, there may be some API changes between the versions (although the core modules are usually pretty backwards compatible).

> Is there any actual risk of breakage in moving
> from 5.8 to 5.10 to 5.12?

There are things that are different, but they don't affect most scripts (in some cases there are new warnings with newer perl where some minor changes need to be made to get things to run without seeing stuff printed to STDERR).

> Looking at the announcements, I don't see
> any potential issues, just additional features. Is there any reason to
> keep the older perl versions?

Not really. The only reason I can think of is to enable people to have a very controlled move to newer perl.
--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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