I don't much care what version we choose. I use much newer vintages of Perl in everything I do. That said, here are my thoughts:
I agree with Tim's sentiment: I don't think we should care one way or the other about Linux because perlbrew is just so darn easy. I just proposed tying ourselves to OS-supplied minima to get ideas rolling. As far as I'm concerned, anybody on a Linux that uses an ancient Perl should be encouraged to use the PDL supplied in their package management system or switch to perlbrew. If they want stability and don't want perlbrew, they get stability, bugs and all. The perlbrew argument applies equally to Mac (although Mac does not provide a package management system with PDL). That leaves us with concerns for Windows users, chiefly Cygwin users. Given that Chris, our Pumpking, uses Cygwin and has put enormous effort into getting Windows and Cygwin compatibility, I would strongly oppose chucking out Cygwin compatibility. That said, Cygwin reportedly ships 5.14<http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-announce/2012-07/msg00011.html>. Also, it may be possible to run perlbrew on Cygwin<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12094783/does-perlbrew-work-with-cygwin>. So, honestly, I see no reason we don't switch to 5.14. I can't imagine many people having their own scripts or modules break because they upgraded to a newer Perl. Given that perlbrew does give some trouble installing on Cygwin, I think we should tie ourselves to the minimum supported Perl on Cygwin. Reini has indicated it will be a little while before he moves to a higher version, so that'll be stable for a little while. David On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 5:40 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > > From: Judd Taylor > Sent: Friday, November 22, 2013 6:14 AM > > > What specifically are you planning on introducing into the code that will >> break older perls than 5.10? >> > > Hi Judd, > > There's currently (as of PDL-2.007_01) stuff like "pack 'l<l<A16L<L', ..." > and "pack 'L<*', ..." in PDL/IO/Storable.pm. If that section of code gets > called on pre-5.10, it's a runtime error because those earlier perls don't > understand the coercion to small-endian order via the '<' template. > > Perl 5.8 does have "V" which packs an unsigned long into little-endian > order, but I don't see anything that packs a *signed* long into > little-endian order. > It would seem (to me) a pity to have to work around such deficiencies, > though I'm not passionate about this. > > Cheers, > Rob > > > > _______________________________________________ > PDL-porters mailing list > [email protected] > http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/pdl-porters > -- "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." -- Brian Kernighan
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