Upgrading perl from 5.12 to 5.16?

[Derek Lamb]

On May 29, 2013, at 8:45 AM, Daniel J. Luke wrote:

> 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.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> 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...)
> 

While I mostly agree with the sentiment in that last statement, there have been several instances recently where a Perl API change caused a module to stop functioning properly--not just a binary incompatibility, but a change in the way the XS or macro behaves or what it returned.  So even without the general need to carefully monitor the installed software, issues can come up by constantly revbumping a package is a dependent of so many others, without any ability to rollback until the modules get updated.

I'm not sure there's a good solution here that's going to appease all users, unfortunately.  TIMTOWTDI, and all that.

(somebody advised me--just do everything in perlbrew.  And I thought "great--then I get 2 Apple perls, 2 MP perls, and X Perlbrew perls.  Plus my locally-developed module tree.  What a mess!")

Derek