Upgrading Perl... Somebody just shoot me and put me out of my misery!

[Matthias Andree]

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Am 23.11.2013 23:25, schrieb Matthew Seaman:
> On 23/11/2013 22:12, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
>>> and you will thus need to recompile all ports that depend on Perl.
>> This is the part that is still utterly baffling.
>>
>> Why would _anything_ that is in any way dependent upon the Perl interpreter
>> need to be rebuilt?  In this switch to threads=on, has the language itself
>> changed?  And if not, shouldn't the change to multi-threading capability
>> within the interpreter be utterly transparent to (and a non-event for)
>> any and all pre-existing Perl code?
>>
>> Obviously, there's something that I'm missing, but I have no idea what it
>> might be.
> 
> Technically, you don't actually need to recompile something that's pure
> perl, or that only requires perl to run some scripts.  However
> everything that has a binary interface with perl -- XS modules, software
> with embedded perl interpreters -- certainly will need recompiling to
> match the new threaded ABI that has now become the default.
> 
> The advice to 'recompile everything that depends on perl' is overkill,
> but it's a simple way to be sure that you have in fact recompiled
> everything necessary.  Picking out only those ports that really needed
> to be recompiled would require a procedure too unweildy to be usefully
> described in UPDATING.

Well, we might want to revive a Makefile target or script that helped
with that.  If we have that in place, perhaps as separate
perl-upgrade-helper port, we don't need lengthy fragile explanations...

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