Re: Oldest supported Perl version
- From
H.Merijn Brand <h.m.brand@xs4all.nl>
- Date
- Apr 20, 2009, 16:18 UTC
- Message-ID
- <20090420181806.229b833e@pc09.procura.nl>
- In-Reply-To
- <76718490904200759l24e1bd9exe0e1b60f7b2847a7@mail.gmail.com>
On Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:59:00 -0400, Jay Soffian <jaysoffian@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 9:58 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote: > > Sorry, I should have checked myself. defined-or "//" is 5.8.1 or later.
Being the maintainer of the defined-or patch for perl 5.8, I can short-circuit this
* defined-or (//) is officially available from perl-5.10.0 and up you can be *sure* to have it there. the 'err' keyword that was the low-precedence version for // is gone.
* defined-or is available in any version of perl 5.8.x is the binary was built with the appropriate patch, which is available on my CPAN directory: ftp://download.xs4all.nl/pub/mirror/CPAN/authors/id/H/HM/HMBRAND/ These patches still include the 'err' keyword
* defined-or is definitely NOT available in 5.6.x
All my perl-5.8.x builds include this patch, so all people that use my perl builds on HP-UX, will have it available.
One major distribution also included it in their perl builds, but I do not remember which it is.
My personal preference for the lowest usable and reliable perl version is 5.8.5 (FWIW)
Show 41 quoted lines
> > Now the real question was if we still support anything older, and if so > > what is the bottom version? > > > > I certainly can go with "5.8.1 or later", but I vaguely recall during the > > gitweb discussion we said anything without the utf-8 support is unusable > > for gitweb, but I think we also said that the rest of the git codebase > > should support running with something older (5.6.1, perhaps). > > 15 minutes of research: > > * 2006-06-25 Junio C Hamano: "Tentatively let's say our cut-off point is > somewhere around 5.6." -- > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/22607 > > * 2008-05-30 Lea Wiemann: "Gitweb relies on Unicode support (e.g. "use > Encode") and will continue to be compatible with 5.8 and 5.10 only" -- > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/83339 > > * 2008-08-13 Lea Wiemann: "This makes Git.pm dependent on Perl 5.6.1. Some > tests (like t3701-add-interactive.sh) seem to work with pretty much any Perl > version out there, and requiring File::Spec changes this" -- > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/92260 > > * 2008-08-15 Marcus Griep: "Git.pm: Make File::Spec and File::Temp requirement > lazy" -- c14c8ce > > * 2008-08-30 Junio C Hamano: "I agree we should say we rely on 5.6 or newer." > -- http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/94399 > > * 2008-09-01 Junio C Hamano: "I personally think it is probably Ok to declare > that we do depend on 5.8" -- > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/94523 > > > So here's my take-away. For the *.perl scripts and gitweb, it's 5.8.0. For the > test suite and Git.pm, all Perl versions are theoretically supported, but for > practical purposes, it may be 5.6.0. > > Whatever is decided this time, perhaps it should be burned into the tops of > the *.perl scripts (i.e. "require 5.008;"). It should also be added to > CodingGuidelines. You know, so this conversation doesn't keep recurring. :-)
-- H.Merijn Brand http://tux.nl Perl Monger http://amsterdam.pm.org/ using & porting perl 5.6.2, 5.8.x, 5.10.x, 5.11.x on HP-UX 10.20, 11.00, 11.11, 11.23, and 11.31, OpenSuSE 10.3, 11.0, and 11.1, AIX 5.2 and 5.3. http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/ http://www.test-smoke.org/ http://qa.perl.org http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/