On Mon, 17 Nov 2008, chromatic wrote:
> On Monday 17 November 2008 11:07:52 Andrew Dougherty wrote:
>
> > Note, by the way, that perl-5.8.8 only shipped with Storable 2.15.
>
> Perl 5.8.8 doesn't ship with File::Which either, and we require that too.
> (We
> do bundle that in our repository, which is something we shouldn't do and
> something I thought we didn't do anymore).
>
> Here are my assumptions:
>
> * anyone building Parrot now can install dependencies (working C compilation
> environment, potentially a bignum library, some CPAN modules, potentially
> flex/bison or equivalents)
Yes, true enough, though of course the bigger the web of dependencies, the
potentially more fragile things become, and the higher the barrier to
newcomers. (ICU, for example, was quite a bit of a mess at one time,
except on a very few platforms where it was well supported.) As usual,
a balance is called for. Parrot's current dependencies are quite mild
and, in my opinion, don't present a significant barrier.
> * it's simpler to require a single version of a dependency that we know will
> work reliably across platforms and other dependency versions than to create
> and maintain a matrix of platforms, dependencies, and versions [. . . ]
Yes, completely agreed. But my point was that I have seen no evidence
that 2.12 *didn't* work reliably. The log for revision 31585 only
mentions Storable-2.09. Ticket [perl #59600] contains the only vague
indication of there being a problem with versions < 2.13, but doesn't say
what the problem actually was. It also admits uncertainty about which
precise versions might be involved. So I did some testing. As far as
I could determine, 5.8.4 + 2.12 worked just fine, so I reported that.
When told I was wrong, I rechecked and reported, with enough detail so
that it was obvious exactly what I did.
> I realize that requiring people to install Storable 2.18 is somewhat of a
> headache, but it looks like the type of headache that's much smaller than the
> headaches of the alternatives.
No, it's not a headache. It's just that, as far as I can tell, it's
totally unnecessary.
I have so many different versions of perl built and installed already
anway that it doesn't really affect me in any significant way. I was
just trying to help keep the entry barrier low for others.
But I don't really care very much, so I'll stop now.
--
Andy Dougherty [EMAIL PROTECTED]
