Perl version in -STABLE

Anton Berezin tobez at tobez.org
Mon May 19 03:11:50 PDT 2003


On Fri, May 16, 2003 at 10:02:06AM +0200, Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote:
> Doug Barton <DougB at FreeBSD.org> writes:
> > I also think that this change would break faith with those users of
> > RELENG_4 that were promised that the perl in that branch would never be
> > upgraded. We don't even HAVE a 5.005_03 port, so those who depend on it
> > would be left in the dust.
> 
> Those people are better served with running a security branch, where
> Perl will never be updated.

Personally I agree with one of the opinions in this thread regarding
the increasing amount of attention it requires to maintain perl-using
ports to work with three different versions of perl (if this is at all
possible).

I would not like to see the base system perl updated, though.  And the
reason for that is that to me (some will differ with me here), the
winning argument in favor of perl removal from 5.X was that perl's build
process does not fit well into FreeBSD's build process and the
consequent difficulty of base system perl upgrades.

I can see the following alternatives to your suggestion:

1. Do nothing.  It *is* likely that the ports will drop 4.X support in
   three/four months, however long 4.X is going to be with us.  In this
   case we simply won't care.

2. *Remove* perl from 4.X.  I could live with that.  This will require
   sysinstall change to install perl package by default.

3. Make lang/perl5* to `use.perl port' automatically on 4.X (it already
   does that on 5.X).  This will also require sysinstall change to
   install perl package by default.

My priorities would be 1, 3, 2, 0, where 0 is your suggestion to update
system perl to 5.6.

As a side note, I don't really understand how people can use 5.8.0 in
production.  The inability to manually dispatch pending signals in XS
code, combined with the current implementation of reliable signals is a
single showstopper.  5.8.1 will fix that, and it is going to happen
soon.

Cheers,
\Anton.
-- 
You shouldn't be intimidated by this issue at all, since Perl is your
friend. -- Apache mod_perl guide


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