Upgrading perl from 5.12 to 5.16?

[Daniel J. Luke]

On May 29, 2013, at 1:13 PM, Derek Lamb <derek at boulder.swri.edu> wrote:
>> 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.

in the general case, these kinds of things are pretty rare - and should be caught by the module's test(s).

If you've got a big project that requires careful control of module changes, you probably aren't using MacPorts to manage your perl/module installs (or maybe I'm wrong and lots of people do 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!")


perlbrew is nice, but if I were using it to manage perl on my Mac, I probably wouldn't bother with installing any MP perl (unless it came as a dependency of something else).

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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