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

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Dec 24, 2017, 14:38 UTC
Message-ID: <20171224143831.GD23648@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20171223174400.26668-1-avarab@gmail.com>

On Sat, Dec 23, 2017 at 05:44:00PM +0000, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

> This is similar to Jeff King's jk/drop-ancient-curl series in that
> we're dropping perl releases that are rarely tested anymore, however
> unlike those patches git still works on e.g. 5.8.8 (I couldn't build
> anything older).

Heh, I'm not sure if those are the best prior art to justify this, since I stopped posting them after getting complaints (though I'll admit I was considering re-posting them since AFAICT nobody has stepped up to fix the breakage after many months).

This may be more like the recent C99 weather-balloon patches, in that we're not using the new features yet, but want to see if anybody screams at this first change.

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].

As far as this actual perl change goes, I don't have a strong opinion. I agree it would be nice to eventually move forward, and your reasoning about what constitutes "old" seems sane. But we also don't write much perl in this project these days, and I don't see a lack of modern perl features causing a lot of headaches.

-Peff