> > Perl 5.6.1 is incredibly old (April 2001). I cannot find any evidence of > any current distribution supporting it.
IIRC, declaring a program version is recommended practice, as future versions of Perl may have different defaults w.r.t opt-in behaviours like `use warnings` and `use strict`. The `use v5.6.1;` directive instructs Perl to assume the defaults for that particular version, ensuring no accidental breakage. On Mon, 31 Oct 2022 at 15:42, Dave Kemper <saint.s...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 10/30/22, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote: > > They'll be told at configure time, because we have an Autoconf test for > > it. > > Reasonable. > > > Furthermore, I've rewritten grog nearly completely since Bernd last > > touched it. I don't have any idea what Perl 5.6(.1) features Bernd had > > in mind when he added that statement. > > Also reasonable. I knew grog had been largely rewritten, but didn't > scrutinize the history closely enough to realize that line was an > artifact from its old life. > > > Perl 5.6.1 is incredibly old (April 2001). I > > cannot find any evidence of any current distribution supporting it. > > I'm less convinced by this -- unless a difficult roadblock stands in > the way, I think modern groff ought to work or fail gracefully on an > obsolete platform -- but the prior two points are convincing enough on > their own. > > > I'd prefer to audit the script as you describe than to restore this > > arcane feature to it; I had to find out about it the hard way. > > Makes sense. I thought this audit might be onerous, but your patch in > the followup email doesn't change many lines (and followed pretty > quickly on the heels of this email). It looks good to me! > >
