On Thu, 2009-06-25 at 12:11 -0400, Theo Van Dinter wrote:
> fwiw, the decision to drop support for older perls isn't really about
> "those folks don't get support for their OS" or "it's old so let's
> drop it".
Nope, and it isn't necessarily introducing an incompatibility either. It
is a conscious decision the actively support recent-ish Perl. It does
not imply SA not running on 5.6 (maybe with some customization).
It does however mean that we will not have to work around any Perl 5.6
issues during the entire SA 3.3 lifetime. Keeping compatibility is a
nice bonus if feasible, but we are not guaranteeing it.
> In the "let's drop 5.0 support and require 5.6" decision
> process, it was about "we are having a hard time supporting the 5.0
> series with numerous regexp issues and if (perl_ver < 5.6) { } else {}
> sections".
See bug 5574. Even 2 years ago we where "having a hard time supporting"
5.6 (as you put it so nicely ;), because there was no infrastructure to
test compatibility on the devs end.
Even worse, that very bug shows that critical fixes might need to be
back-ported. That means smoke-testing on ancient Perl 5.6 up to the end
of the 3.4(!) lifetime.
> I don't think we have a large number of those types of issues, so I
> don't think there's a huge reason to drop support for older perls for
> those people who still, for whatever reason, use them.
Also, keep the nasty hacks in mind (bug 6131), which effectively means
we are incompatible with the latest Perl, for the sake of Perl 5.6
compatibility. That's a bad trade-off.
guenther
> > With my previous comment I was specifically referring to comments like
> > in bug 5574. Comment 11 outlines the general age of Perl releases and
> > the Linux part of the picture. Comment 21 argues about MacOS. Anyone
> > know details about BSD, Solaris and maybe others?
> >
> > Also, of course, I was about fixing bug 6131 properly. Hence me
> > explicitly mentioning requiring Perl 5.8.1 -- or alternatively 5.8.0
> > with an additional MakeMaker min dep.
--
char *t="\10pse\0r\0dtu...@ghno\x4e\xc8\x79\xf4\xab\x51\x8a\x10\xf4\xf4\xc4";
main(){ char h,m=h=*t++,*x=t+2*h,c,i,l=*x,s=0; for (i=0;i<l;i++){ i%8? c<<=1:
(c=*++x); c&128 && (s+=h); if (!(h>>=1)||!t[s+h]){ putchar(t[s]);h=m;s=0; }}}
