perl5, perl5.* changes

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Feb 26, 2011, at 22:54, Daniel J. Luke wrote:

> On Feb 26, 2011, at 6:28 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> 
>> These people don't care about perl, they just care about other software that happens to use perl, and that's an implementation detail they expect the package manager to handle for them. This upgrade should have been handled in a way that "sudo port upgrade outdated" would have worked properly for these (and all) users.
> 
> Sure. Are you suggesting that something can/should be done right now to help this?

One was already suggested: the perl5 port should have added a 5.8 variant that became the default, then waited many weeks until "everybody" has that version, then the default can become 5.12 later, which would thus affect any new users but not any existing users, thus not requiring a rebuild.

Or, perl5 could have become "the" perl port, at whatever version, and all p5-* ports that need rebuilds would have gotten their revisions bumped.

There may be other ideas. I have not completely thought through the problem, and don't really have the time or inclination to do so right now.


> Are you suggesting some way to handle this in the future (perl5.14?) so that we won't have this problem then?

Certainly, future upgrades should also be considered.


> There have been discussions of this for quite some time now - it's probably better that we have some pain and get more people on perl5.12 than keep perl5.8 as the 'standard' perl for forever...

However, I don't want to handle the support consequences of the way this change was done for the next 6-12 months.