<div dir="ltr">I second perl 5.22. And that we should only support the latest perl.</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div><div class="gmail_signature">—Mark<br>_______________________<br>Mark E. Anderson <<a href="mailto:emer@emer.net" target="_blank">emer@emer.net</a>><br></div></div>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 5:39 PM, Daniel J. Luke <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dluke@geeklair.net" target="_blank">dluke@geeklair.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><span class="">> On Jul 14, 2015, at 12:22 PM, David Evans <<a href="mailto:devans@macports.org">devans@macports.org</a>> wrote:<br>
> My point in being cautious has to do with fact that perl5.22 has just recently been released as the latest stable version.<br>
<br>
</span>this is criteria we don’t have in general for any other ports.<br>
<br>
If upstream says it’s stable, it’s what we provide in almost all cases.<br>
<span class=""><br>
> I have confidence in perl5.22<br>
> itself but the fact that it is stable says nothing about whether the various Perl modules work with it properly.<br>
<br>
</span>traditionally, we find out when things break by people complaining - as a project we don’t do a lot of proactive testing.<br>
<span class=""><br>
> They are completely untested on Macports<br>
> 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.<br>
><br>
> And this testing is really cursory.<br>
<br>
</span>we should set up something to run the automated test suite included with almost every module.<br>
<br>
We should probably get out of the business of perl module portfiles entirely, too.<br>
<span class=""><br>
> I am concerned that switching to perl5.22 immediately will inevitably cause unexpected consequences in terms of module useability.<br>
<br>
</span>most things will probably work, some things are probably already broken, anything remaining is somewhat reasonable to fix as people report it.<br>
<span class=""><br>
> 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<br>
> 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.<br>
<br>
</span>I’m not volunteering to do this work, so I guess if you’re willing to do it - go for it.<br>
<span class=""><br>
> 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.<br>
<br>
</span>I would strongly recommend we don’t add lag time here - just update the perl port once its released and update/patch modules if they turn out to be broken. Module authors/people who use the modules have some responsibility to keep their module maintained.<br>
<span class=""><br>
> 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.<br>
<br>
</span>I believe cpan already does automated test suite runs of several versions of perl on several OSes for modules - no need for us to duplicate that.<br>
<span class="im HOEnZb"><br>
> Enough discussion. Let's make a decision and get on with it.<br>
<br>
</span><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5">--<br>
Daniel J. Luke<br>
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