changing default perl

[Clemens Lang]

Hi,

On Sun, Nov 03, 2013 at 05:12:45PM -0500, Mark Anderson wrote:
> I'm all for doing what we need to do. I use a lot of perl, and I have
> always tried to install the latest or close to latest. Back before we
> had the perl5 port I had a perl script that read every port file and
> essentially did this: s/perl5.8/perl5.12/ - so I'm a big fan of having
> the latest available.

So your opinion is providing a single perl version (the latest stable
one) would be the way to go?

To be honest, I don't know why we've ever diverged from this strategy.
We're in a habit of shipping the latest and greatest version of software
for most ports we have, sometimes even if breaks dependents (in which
case we try to fix the dependents or get upstream to fix them for us).
Maybe somebody who has seen the transition back then can comment on
that?

We're in a similar situation for python (and will probably be for php,
mysql, ...), where we still allow users to install versions that have
run out of support (even security-related) years ago, but I fear that's
another can of worms we can open when the perl situation is resolved and
we've learned our share from doing so.

I'd advocate for keeping the subport magic, though – there *will* be a
perl 6 sooner or later, and not throwing away that might simplify this
transition a lot.

-- 
Clemens Lang