perl5.8 fixup

[Marcus Calhoun-Lopez]

Bradley Giesbrecht <brad at ...> writes:

Thank you for the clarification.

> > If I understand what is being discussed (please correct me if I'm  
> > wrong),
> > we would
> >   * copy perl5.8 -> perl5.8-core.
> >   * create a port which installs all the core p5 ports.
> >   * make perl5.8 do nothing except depend on perl5.8-core and the  
> > new p5 umbrella port.
> >
> > It seems that this does not buy us anything, so I fear I am missing  
> > something.
> 
> It buys us perl modules as p5 ports that used to be part of perl5.
> This allows us to update those p5 ports to newer required versions  
> without having to have a perl5 revision increment and upgrade perl5.

It seems it would only do that if the @INC variable were modified
or conflicting modules pruned from perl5.8.

I would suggest that these goals could be accomplished more easily
by the following (sorry for the duplication from an earlier message):
  * Modify @INC so the newer p5 ports are found first.
  * Do not add conflicting p5 port as dependencies unless the newer version is
         actually required (mitigate the potential problems).
  * Prepend p5- to the conflicting man pages.
  * Modify the -f p5 ports so they no longer install in the directory
perl reserves for itself.

This would require a minor change to perl5.8, a few minor
changes to "-f" p5 ports and some cleanup to minimize dependencies.

-Marcus