Re: [PATCH 00/13] Update versions of libcurl and Perl

From: Alejandro R. Sedeño <asedeno@mit.edu>
Date: Oct 14, 2024, 13:28 UTC
Message-ID: <20241014132856.3558224-1-asedeno@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20241010235621.738239-1-sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>

"brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> The Perl changes are a huge upgrade.  5.8.1, our former supported
> version, was from 2003.  5.26 has substantially improved Unicode support
> (including Unicode strings), s///r (to allow returning a modified value
> instead of modifying it in place), postderef syntax (which also provides
> better interpolation for complex expressions), and subroutine signatures
> (although these are experimental until 5.36).  These allow us much more
> readable, modern Perl.

This sounds compelling, however...

> The final commit introduces a small but useful change that we can now
> take advantage of with our newly updated Perl dependency as an example
> of why this is a generally beneficial change.  It can be omitted without
> problem if it is judged to be too noisy.

The change being made to illustrate the point is not at all compelling to me. This appears to be an update for the sake of an update, with very minor benefit at great compatibility cost.

I'm especially opposed to the change in gitweb/gitweb.perl, as that script is the one that is most likely to be used in a web-hosting environment where the user does not have control over the version of perl being used. And yes, those users would be better off hosting on a newer platform, but that's not a good reason to break them with no real gain for git.

-Alejandro