On Jun 8, 2014, at 8:26 PM, Daniel J. Luke <dl...@geeklair.net> wrote:

> so, perl5.20 is out (and the new/current latest stable version)...
> 
> any chance we can get a little less crazy and just ship the 'current' perl 
> (instead of being perpetually behind)?

The current issues are:

1. We need a perl5.20 port. Difficulty: ? 

It would be really nice if the perl5.X ports could be merged into a single 
Portfile with subports so that new perl versions would be relatively easy to 
add. All of the current perl ports seem to be different enough that I don’t 
understand what is required for perl5.20. 

2. The perl5 and intltool ports need a perl5_20 variant added. Difficulty: Easy 

3. All of the p5-* ports need to be updated to add 5.20 to the perl5.branches 
line. Difficulty: Hard

We have barely made a dent adding p5.18 subports. It would be much better if 
the perl5 portgroup simply always added p5-* subports up to 5.20. Individual 
portfiles could override that if some perl versions do not work. Checking and 
adding p5.20 to each p5-* port seems like an insurmountable goal, certainly in 
the short-term. The only way to do that would be to globally add it to every 
p5-* port without testing. At that point, we should simply add it to the perl5 
portgroup. Given that all p5-* Portfiles have the perl5.branches line, I think 
it should be removed from all of them globally. But then we have the issue of 
notifying maintainers first. Having the perl5 portgroup add new perl versions 
seems to me to be the only way we are ever going to stay current with perl 
versions. 

$ port list p5.18-* | wc -l
      96
$ port list p5.16-* | wc -l
    1027
$ port list p5.12-* | wc -l
    1028

The biggest thing we have going for us is that most of the perl ports are not 
maintained. At the same time, no one is doing much about the perl issue in 
Macports and that’s why it is behind the current version. 


Cheers!
Frank

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