What's the push to require the latest Perl?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jan 5, 2018, at 17:49, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> On Fri, 5 Jan 2018, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
>> If you have been using perl5.24 and p5.24 modules for your own projects and now want to use perl5.26, simply install the p5.26 versions of the modules you want.
> 
> Err, why should a user have to waste disk space on two versions of Perl? Surely if a port needs features in 5.24 then it should be happy with 5.26?

I guess I don't have any answers that are going to make you happy. MacPorts has limited manpower. We've chosen a solution that we believe works. It may come at the expense of some disk space. This is not the first nor the last decision we've made that will have that consequence.


>> I have not used FreeBSD and am not familiar with the UPDATING file.
> 
> I do, and I am :-)  It's a file summarising the changes in that particular update, with particular attention on traps for the unwary etc e.g. "You must now do XXX" etc.

OK. Ports don't generally provide anything like that, though a port maintainer can choose to put such information into the "notes" field when upgrading a port to a new major version, and that would then be shown to the user when upgrading the port.