I think the right thresholds are 5.10 for absolute minimum and 5.16 for 'we aren't going to test with anything older than this'
I appreciate the effort to increase compatibility with old versions. I imagine you could provide Digest::SHA "internally", or test for it as Nick suggested, but I know how much of a pain it is to avoid/check for use of things that have seemingly been around forever. (Comes up all the time in the TeX world.) _Possibly_ we would also want `use open qw(:std :utf8)`, I'm not sure. I feel sure that people have old-but-working Autoconf-related files in other encodings. What would be gained by forcing UTF-8? For that matter, I'm not sure why Autoconf (or Automake) needs to be Unicode-aware at all? Best, Karl