Upgrading perl from 5.12 to 5.16?

[Daniel J. Luke]

On May 29, 2013, at 8:59 AM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> Seems like a lot of work. What's the benefit? It works the way it is now. The only "problem" is it forces users to install perl5.12 even if they want another version. But nothing prevents them from *also* installing the version they want.


it's also a lot of work with very little benefit to have things the way we have them now.

While I still think we should just have a perl5 port that provides the current stable perl5 (5.18.0 right now), and revbump the p5 ports when we move to new ABI incompatible versions (ie 5.18 to 5.20) - if we're going to insist on supporting multiple perl5 versions, we should actually support them (of course, I'm guilty of not having perl5 variants for all of our perl5 versions in my ports too).

I still don't understand why don't do:

perl5 - current perl5 version 
p5 ports - only for the current perl5 version

optionally - older perls if someone wants to maintain them (probably without any corresponding module ports).

of course, it would also be easier if we had our own cpanm variant (or something like it) that 'did the right thing' (either having port install the appropriate p5-port, or automatically synthesizing an appropriate p5 port, or populating the registry, or something like that). 

I use perl, and as far as I know, there's no good reason to have older perls available in the ports tree (people who need to be very careful about monitoring the installed versions of their software probably shouldn't be using MacPorts to manage things, or already have their own shadow ports trees...)

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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