What's the push to require the latest Perl?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sat, 6 Jan 2018, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

>> 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.

Well, I guess that depends upon how you answered it...  I wasn't asking 
you whether you had the manpower to support a change I did not request, I 
asked whether there was any technical reason why a port that needs Perl 
5.24 would not be happy with Perl 5.26.

[ 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.

You might want to note that FreeBSD ports uses a ">=" test on versions 
e.g. Perl 5.26 will satisfy the 5.24 requirement (unless, of course, there 
was the aforesaid technical reason why it cannot).

And if it comes down to a simple manpower issue, then let the record show
that I am willing to help if it will avoid people (like me) having to
have multiple versions of Perl bloatware (which reason, by the way, is why 
I'm starting to move to Ruby instead; Python is for the birds).

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."