What's the push to require the latest Perl?

[Craig Treleaven]

> On Dec 31, 2017, at 11:46 PM, Bill Cole <macportsusers-20171215 at billmail.scconsult.com> wrote:
> 
> 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 Doing a 'port -y upgrade outdated' reveals that multiple ports are threatening to demand perl5.26 if I try to upgrade them, like whois!?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…

I’m not the best to explain the situation, but the issue basically comes down to manpower.  We have many thousands of ports and not all that many active maintainers.  It is felt that supporting multiple Perl versions drains resources that would be better spent keeping up to date.  Especially since older versions are no longer supported upstream or even receiving critical security fixes.

Since most users receive and install pre-compiled binaries, it doesn’t present a big burden when they upgrade.  Should a user be concerned about old versions wasting disk space, the port reclaim command is available to pare things down.

As the home page says: "We provide a single software tree that attempts to track the latest release of every software title (port) we distribute”.  Note the _latest release_ part.

Craig