On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 08:46:11PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote: > Tim Bunce <tim.bu...@pobox.com> writes: > > On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 01:45:45PM -0800, David E. Wheeler wrote: > >> On Jan 6, 2010, at 12:20 PM, Tom Lane wrote: > >>> One of the things on my to-do list for today is to make configure reject > >>> Perl versions less than $TBD. I thought we had agreed a week or so back > >>> that 5.8 was the lowest safe version because of utf8 and other > >>> considerations. > >> > >> +1, and 5.8.3 at a minimum for utf8 stuff, 5.8.8 much much better. > > > I think we said 5.8.1 at the time, but 5.8.3 sounds good to me. > > There would be _very_ few places using < 5.8.6. > > I went with 5.8 as the cutoff, for a couple of reasons: we're not in > the business of telling people they ought to be up-to-date, but only of > rejecting versions that demonstrably fail badly; I think 5.8.0 will fail badly, possibly demonstrably but more likely in subtle ways relating to utf8 that are hard to debug.
> and I found out that > older versions of awk are not sufficiently competent with && and || to > code a more complex test properly :-(. A version check that doesn't > actually do what it claims to is worse than useless, and old buggy awk > is exactly what you'd expect to find on a box with old buggy perl. Either of these approaches should work back to perl 5.0... perl -we 'use 5.008001' 2>/dev/null && echo ok or perl -we 'exit($] < 5.008001)' && echo ok > (It's also worth noting that the perl version seen at configure time > is not necessarily that seen at runtime, anyway, so there's not a lot > of point in getting too finicky here.) A simple use 5.008001; at the start of src/pl/plperl/plc_perlboot.pl would address that. I believe Andrew is planing to commit my plperl refactor patch soon. He could add it then, or I could add it to my feature patch (which I plan to reissue soon, with very minor changes, and add to commitfest). Tim. -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers