What's the push to require the latest Perl?

[Bill Cole]

Ah, so apparently the reason this met total silence was that it got 
lost/dropped somewhere so only I thought it was posted. Odd...

Reposted message:

 From: Bill Cole <macportsusers-20171215 at billmail.scconsult.com>
To: macports-users at lists.macports.org
Subject: What's the push to require the latest Perl?
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2017 18:00:20 -0500

In regards to https://trac.macports.org/ticket/55208 :

In doing pre-upgrade due diligence I ran across this:

# port rdeps p5.24-net-dns
The following ports are dependencies of p5.24-net-dns @1.140.0_0:
   perl5.24
[...]
   p5.24-net-libidn2
     libidn2
       pkgconfig
       autoconf
         xz
       automake
       libtool
         xattr
           unzip
       libunistring
         perl5
         texinfo
           help2man
             perl5.26
             p5.26-locale-gettext


That seems unhelpful... Why would help2man demand the absolute latest 
Perl? Well, because the Portfile says it does. However, in the real 
world, help2man is happy with any perl since 5.8.

Doing a 'port -y upgrade outdated' reveals that multiple ports are 
threatening to demand perl5.26 if I try to upgrade them, like whois!? 
Because it needs perl to build???

This is insanity. Can anyone convince me otherwise or even explain how 
this hasn't led to an angry mob with torches and pitchforks? Because I 
have one of each if anyone wants to join the revolt...

-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com or billcole at apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Currently Seeking Steady Work: https://linkedin.com/in/billcole