changing default perl

[Jeremy Lavergne]

>> I’m not sure that making more work is really something we want to do.
> 
> Right. But I’m not sure what course of action you’re advocating with that sentence.

Introducing another perl5 variant means that’s another set of ports and their variants we need to clean up if we were to switch to perl_select. We would end up undoing anything new we add for perl variants.

It would be less wasted effort to start converting things to perl_select if that’s our end game, but it remains unclear if perl_select is the end game—at least how i’m reading all our perl threads.

> Yes, but the OP was asking how to make “perl” be “perl5.18”. That’s the kind of thing that “port select” is supposed to be for, except that it would conflict with files from the “perl5” port. I don’t think we can suggest people use “port select” for perl until the old perl5 port and all references to it have been removed.

Hence why the above is “more work” because if we added the variant we’d have to go back and remove it again later. If you really think it’s not that big of a problem, then it should be added. I just fear this is another instance where we continue "kicking the can down the road".

> The other option Daniel advocates is going back to a single perl. That would involve even more work, finding all ports that depend on perl5.x or any p5.x module, changing them to the one true perl, and also rewriting the perl5 portgroup again and all p5 ports and revbumping all of them.

It would definitely make perl life much easier in the long run. Any of our actual perl users should chime in on this one, or if we were using statistics we’d know roughly how many users are using our “non-default” perls.

> That’s why I proposed the very simple 3-line solution of adding a perl5_18 variant to the perl5 port until we decide which way we want to go.

Yes, but I suspect we won’t be deciding after we add this 3-line solution. I’d rather we hammer out our plan than put in an easy temporary fix as there is then less emphasis on what needs to be done.

I’m just really concerned that MacPorts will continue to sit without making changes.