What have I forgotten about specifying which Perl should be /opt/local/bin/perl?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jan 22, 2022, at 09:22, Gabriel Rosenkoetter wrote:

>> If we stick with multiple perl versions, and the perl5 port to create the symlinks, then maybe it would indeed help reduce some confusion to change the perl5 port's version to 1.0, or a YYYYMMDD date, or anything else that is not the version of one of the perl ports.
> 
> I realize that I just sent an email stating the opposite, and I maintain that "1.0" is a bad idea (because it'll eventually climb to being confusingly similar with actual Perl version numbers),

There is precedent for using an arbitrary version 0.0 or 0.1 or 1.0; see for example our "select" ports:

port info --name --version name:_select$

I wasn't necessarily suggesting that the version should start at 0 or 1 and be increased when the perl version changes. The version could stay at 0 or 1 forever, with just the revision increasing when needed.

> but using a POSIX date sounds very promising to me, and would avoid showing, as above, both "5.28.3" and (something that expands to:) "5.34.0" applied to the same port at the same time.

A date is what we use in several other ports when a version number is not readily available (such as a project that just commits changes to their repository and never releases stable versions) so there is precedent for this as well.