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

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 27, 2017, 19:16 UTC
Message-ID: <20171227191636.GF149622@aiede.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20171223174400.26668-1-avarab@gmail.com>

Hi,

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).

FWIW I think this is a good change. If someone is affected and offers help with keeping git working well with older perl (e.g. setting up CI for us) then we can keep supporting it, but it seems more likely to me that there will just not be anyone affected.

And being able to assume a newer baseline perl version seems beneficial both from a security point of view and from a developer experience pov.

Some minor nits:

[...]

>  contrib/diff-highlight/DiffHighlight.pm | 2 +-
>  contrib/examples/git-difftool.perl      | 2 +-
>  contrib/mw-to-git/Git/Mediawiki.pm      | 2 +-

I'm less opinionated about these. They're already using the same perl baseline as the rest of git, so I suppose it's good to keep them consistent, but if any of them gives you trouble then I think you can just ignore it and let the relevant contrib maintainer take care of it. :)

[...]

Show 7 quoted lines

> --- a/git-add--interactive.perl
> +++ b/git-add--interactive.perl
> @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
>  #!/usr/bin/perl
>  
> -use 5.008;
> +use v5.10.0;

As brian carlson mentioned, 'use 5.010' would produce a clearer error message on ancient perl, which could result in happier users on ancient platforms or clearer bug reports.

That said, I don't have a strong opinion there.

Reviewed-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>