Perl upgrade

[Lars Eighner]

On Sat, 9 May 2009, Jos Chrispijn wrote:

> Not that I am that paranoid, but can someone tell me why Perl 5.8 is not 
> automatically updated to 5.10 thru the ports, but (accordingly by UPDATING) 
> has to be updated by some manual interaction?

You must be new around here.

The process described in UPDATING for upgrading to Perl 5.10 is relatively
painless compared to previous perl upgrades.  So much stuff depends upon
perl that:

1) special treatment is required to be sure you end up with a system that is
functional in practice,

and

2) people should not be misled as to the extent of the work involved.
Use pkg_info -R <name of installed perl package> to see what you may be in
for.

Perl was once ("recently" for some of us) part of the system.  Logic may be
on the side of considering it an application, but as a practical matter it
is a distinction without a (big) difference.


-- 
Lars Eighner
http://www.larseighner.com/index.html
8800 N IH35 APT 1191 AUSTIN TX 78753-5266