Inline::CPP claims to support Perl 5.6.0, and it ought to. Nothing exists within Inline::CPP, or even Inline and Inline::C that would hamper this backward compatibility. But there's one problem: Digest::MD5 got added to the Perl core with Perl v5.8.0. It looks like Digest::MD5 version 2.40 was the last version that remained backward-compatible with Perl 5.8.0 and earlier. The current version of Digest::MD5 (2.51) seems ok back to Perl 5.8.1, but not before.
What does this have to do with Inline? Digest::MD5 is a dependency for Inline. If a user installs Inline, or Inline::CPP, or any other Inline::* on a Perl 5.6.0 through 5.8.0 system that doesn't already have some old version of Digest::MD5 installed, the latest version of Digest::MD5 will be pulled in by the cpan installer. That latest version will fail to build, and cause Inline::* to fail as well. So if we're claiming backward compatibility with Perls earlier than 5.8.1, we would have to qualify that with "If you specifically install Digest::MD5 version 2.40 or lower first." There are two patches sitting in the RT for Digest::MD5 that claim to overcome the issue. One user I've been corresponding with mentioned the following: "With 5.8.0 (64-bit), Digest::MD5 fails testing because it is using utf8::is_utf8 without checking the version (this was added in 5.8.1)." I'm not on the p5p list. Is there a p5p list-member here who would like to raise the issue there? Dave -- David Oswald daosw...@gmail.com