On 7/14/15 7:32 AM, Daniel J. Luke wrote:
On Jul 14, 2015, at 5:37 AM, Mojca Miklavec <[email protected]> wrote:
We should start migrating other ports that depend on Perl to a newer
version of Perl, but the question is: should we go to 5.22 or 5.20?
David proposed to go to 5.20 because 5.22 might be too new and not so
well tested yet.
5.22

5.22 is upstream’s ‘current’ version, and so by our normal policy it’s what we 
should pick. The only reason to go with 5.20 instead was if there was a known 
problem with 5.22 that we couldn’t patch (and even then, we should probably 
just address it with upstream and go with 5.22).

Once we move to 5.22, we should get rid of all of the old perls and just switch 
perl5 to be 5.22 and stop trying to support multiple perl versions.

--
Daniel J. Luke
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I agree with you in principle but ...

My point in being cautious has to do with fact that perl5.22 has just recently been released as the latest stable version. I have confidence in perl5.22 itself but the fact that it is stable says nothing about whether the various Perl modules work with it properly. They are completely untested on Macports with respect to this version other than to say that they build. Because of the apathy towards supporting Perl modules, in general, by the MacPorts maintainer community (952/1373 modules are nomaintainer), the only time modules actually get tested is when they are updated. Maybe.

And this testing is really cursory.

I am concerned that switching to perl5.22 immediately will inevitably cause unexpected consequences in terms of module useability.

My compromise proposal is to switch to perl5.20 as the default now and drop all Perl versions except perl5.20 and perl5.22. Then plan to drop perl5.20 in say three to six months, after there is time for upstream module maintainers to address remaining perl5.22 issues, and leave perl5.22 as the sole Perl version supported. After that, update the sole Perl port not at the time of the next stable period, but, again, 3 to 6 months thereafter for the same reasons.

An ongoing program of testing existing modules against the current unstable Perl version would be a further improvement in quality control/assurance but I doubt we have the interest or manpower available to do it.

Enough discussion.  Let's make a decision and get on with it.

Dave






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