Hi Paul, Eric. > Paul Eggert wrote: > >> Solaris 8 ships with Perl 5.005_03. This satisfies Autoconf 'configure', >> which requires only 5.005_03 or better. But >> lib/Autom4te/Getopt.pm and lib/Autom4te/General.pm >> require 5.006_002. > As I can test with at most with perl 5.6.2 (and no older versions), I tend to require the 5.6.2 version in any new perl file, or any existing file I do non-trivial modifications upon.
> Eric Blake wrote: > > From those lists, the two projects share Channels.pm, Getopt.pm, and > Struct.pm. But Getopt.pm originates its minimum of 5.6.2 thanks to > autoconf commit c3797b86ccbd9. Does lowering the minimum requirement to > 5.5 fix things, or do we need to revert that patch to actually re-add > the workaround that was dropped by that commit bumping to a newer > version of perl? > I've no idea, since I cannot test with 5.5. Also, Automake already requires perl 5.6 globally (and check for it in its configure), so I don't think its appropriate to introduce a workaround for a perl version it won't use anyway. Sorry. Also, note that the workaround removed in c3797b86ccbd9 was severely broken to begin with (that is explained in the commit message); re-introducing it only to make autoconf buildable out-of-the box on an obsolescent Solaris box seems a very bad idea. On the top of all that: Automake is a maintainer tool, so it's OK for it to have requirements tighter w.r.t. older tools that the ones in place for its generated Makefiles. After all, Autoconf is already requiring a fairly modern GNU m4, so why not require perl 5.6 as well? In conclusion, I'm quite oriented to close this bug report as a "wontfix". Regards, Stefano