changing default perl

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Nov 3, 2013, at 4:42 PM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> On Nov 3, 2013, at 15:38, Mark Anderson wrote:
>> Although we do need to come up with a better perl strategy. The current workings drive me crazy.
> 
> I’m curious why that is. We use this strategy for PHP and Python as well and IMHO it works very well there. Do those drive you crazy also, or is it just Perl, and if so, what makes Perl different?

php/python versions exists because there are substantial changes in the language(s) that things written against the older versions not work with newer interpreters.

For perl5 that is largely not the case (there are things that have changed, but mostly in backwards-compatible ways).

perl is also a little different in the wide number of things available on CPAN, and the tendency of (many? most?) people working with perl to make use of CPAN modules whenever possible.

I'm not aware of a compelling use-case for keeping many versions of perl5 around (or at least one that makes sense in the context of MacPorts) - while it does make things more complicated for our end-users.

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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