git/list[1] front-page[2] threads[3] people[4] search[5] about
 

Re: [RFC/PATCH] perl: bump the required Perl version to 5.10.0 from 5.8.0

From
brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date
Dec 23, 2017, 23:17 UTC
Message-ID
<20171223231742.GF6217@genre.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To
<20171223174400.26668-1-avarab@gmail.com>
On Sat, Dec 23, 2017 at 05:44:00PM +0000, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
Show 11 quoted lines
> The reason to do this is to be able to use features released with perl
> in the last decade, 5.10 was a major feature release including things
> like new regex features, state variables, the defined-or operator
> etc.[3]
> 
> I expect this to be more controversial as since the 5.8 release stayed
> along for longer in various distributions, e.g. it's the version
> shipped with RHEL 5, replaced by 5.10 in RHEL 6 released in late 2010,
> similarly the first Debian release to include 5.10 was 5.0 (Lenny)
> released in early 2009. The release history for other distributions
> can be seen on CPAN's "Perl Binaries" page[3].

This is fine by me. As far as I know, 5.10.1 is the oldest version of Perl still security-supported by a major Linux vendor.

Feature-wise, the release I'd much rather see is 5.14, since it provides the r modifier to s/// and tr/// and undef-transparent length, but that simply won't be possible until RHEL 6 and CentOS 6 go EOL. Upgrading to 5.10 is better than nothing, and it does get us defined-or, which is one of the only 5.10 features I ever see used.

I'm curious, though, is there some reason you went with the "v5.10.0" syntax other than "5.010"? I believe the latter provides a better error message on older Perls, although I agree the former is more readable.

-- 
brian m. carlson / brian with sandals: Houston, Texas, US
https://www.crustytoothpaste.net/~bmc | My opinion only
OpenPGP: https://keybase.io/bk2204
Previous: Randall S. BeckerNext: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
Message 3 of 12 in “perl: bump the required Perl version to 5.10.0 from 5.8.0”
  1. perl: bump the required Perl version to 5.10.0 from 5.8.0Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Dec 23, 2017
  2. Randall S. BeckerDec 23, 2017
  3. brian m. carlsonDec 23, 2017
  4. Ævar Arnfjörð BjarmasonDec 24, 2017
  5. Jeff KingDec 24, 2017
  6. Ævar Arnfjörð BjarmasonDec 24, 2017
  7. Eric WongDec 24, 2017
  8. Ævar Arnfjörð BjarmasonDec 25, 2017
  9. Eric WongDec 25, 2017
  10. Junio C HamanoDec 27, 2017
  11. Jonathan NiederDec 27, 2017
  12. Jonathan NiederDec 27, 2017

Read the whole thread, see it on lore, or plain text.

$ cat FOOTERMessages come from the public archive at lore.kernel.org/git, fetched every hour. The front page is chosen and written each morning by an AI editor and can be wrong; the threads themselves are the record. About and API. For agents: an MCP server at https://gitlist.dev/mcp, and any thread, story or person page as Markdown by adding .md to its URL (or sending Accept: text/markdown). Details in /llms.txt.