Updating to Perl 5.16.3 didn't update some packages

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 11 Aug 2014, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

[ Fancy meeting you here :-) ]

> > MacBook 10.6.8 (soon to grow up and become Mavericks), BSD geek new to 
> > the Mac fold.
> 
> Welcome! Do consider updating to Mavericks soon, and Yosemite when it 
> comes out, since as time goes on it becomes more and more difficult to 
> install software on older systems.

Yep, just as soon as I get my Time Capsule repaired (TM sees the disk, it 
can ID it, there's occasional activity (I should fire up a sniffer), but 
it cannot be used as a TC, if that makes sense), and my DVD repaired (it's 
swallowed a DVD and won't spit it out)...

I'm a little queasy about updating without a backup, as I no longer have 
the Snow Leopard media (lost in a house move).

To digress for a moment, does the Mavericks upgrade "just work"?  I'm 
currently backing up $HOME to a USB stick at the moment, but there's no 
way I can revert back to 10.6.8 if it fails and I wind up with an 
expensive paperweight.

> The perl default in MacPorts was recently changed from 5.12 to 5.16. We 
> are in the process of updating individual ports to this new standard. 
> Presumably you had previously manually installed perl5.10, and now one 
> of the ports you use has been upgraded to use perl5.16, so that was 
> additionally installed. At present, multiple perl versions can 
> peacefully coexist, so there is no problem with you continuing to use 
> perl5.10 (or 5.20 or any other version we have) while individual ports 
> continue to use whatever version they're programmed to use.

This was the first time I'd used the ports, so I'm guessing that an 
automatic update somewhere did it.  Hmmm...  An "ls -ltc" shows:

-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  admin  18192 Aug  8 06:16 /opt/local/bin/perl5.16
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  admin      8 Aug  1 20:05 /opt/local/bin/perl -> perl5.16
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  admin      8 Aug  1 20:05 /opt/local/bin/perl5 -> perl5.16
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  admin      8 Aug  1 20:05 /opt/local/bin/perl5.16.3 -> perl5.16
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel  34816 Sep 24  2009 /usr/bin/perl5.8.9
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel  86000 Sep 24  2009 /usr/bin/perl
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel  51200 Sep 24  2009 /usr/bin/perl5.10.0

bash-3.2$ which perl
/opt/local/bin/perl

Looks like the box came with 5.8 and 5.10 when I bought it.

> The port p5-list-moreutils has subports for each available version of 
> perl:

[...]

Thanks.

I found that "perl5.10.0" works, so it's no big deal (I don't even know 
what's in 5.16 yet); I worked around List::MoreUtils, but I need 
Devel::DProf to optimise my stuff.

[...]

> Install whichever subport(s) of that port that you want to use. For 
> example if you want to use List::MoreUtils with perl5.16, install 
> p5.16-list-moreutils.

Thanks.

> According to https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::DProf that module is 
> deprecated, and using "port search dprof" I cannot find it available in 
> MacPorts. If you do have it installed, perhaps you did so using the cpan 
> command at some point.

Trimmed output:

bash-3.2$ ls -ltcd `locate Devel/DProf`
Sep 24 2009 /System/Library/Perl/5.8.9/darwin-thread-multi-2level/Devel/DProf.pm
Sep 24 2009 /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level/Devel/DProf.pm

Interesting.

At a previous $orkplace it was hammered into us to not rely upon CPAN 
modules; we had branches around the world and had to use whatever was on 
the metal, until next hardware upgrade time (and again use whatever the 
DVD came with).

Thanks again; I'll cogitate upon my options.

-- Dave