From: Tom G. Christensen <tgc@statsbiblioteket.dk>
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2010 07:59:59 GMT
Subject: Re: Let's bump the minimum Perl version to 5.8
Message-ID: <4CA04EFF.6010805@statsbiblioteket.dk>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTimNGZom6FfKivg=QNmovz=xf656XHbXCmsjfrxD@mail.gmail.com>

Tor Arntsen wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 15:32, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 13:08, Tor Arntsen <tor@spacetec.no> wrote:
>>> On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 14:56, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> However, I'd like to shift the discussion a bit: Do we want to support
>>>> the 5.6 line *at all* anymore? I don't think so. As you point out
>>>> yourself you can just compile 5.8 or later on these machines.
>>> 5.8 as minimum is probably for the best. It's not that just you can
>>> compile a newer version (5.8), more importantly, Perl 5.8 is available
>>> as a package from those semi-official 3party repositories for most
>>> systems (at least the *nix systems I have access to)
>> Do those repositories also have 5.10 and 5.12?
> 
> Anything later than 5.8 seems to very unusual except for Linux (and
> presumably *bsd).
> 
In Linux land atleast the current crop of RHEL dists are on 5.8.x and 
for RHEL5 this is supported until 2014 (2017 with ELS).

>>> except for those like Irix 6.2 where it's hopeless anyway (perl
>>> 5.0). But I only have access to irix/aix/solaris/tru64 in addition
>>> to Linux.
>> Hrm, 6.2 is old, but 5.12 is known to compile on 6.5 at least. What
>> are the issues with 6.2? Perhaps they could be solved if someone with
>> such a machine contributed a smoker for the perl core.
> 
> IRIX 6.2 is simply suffering for being old. Unless you have to
> maintain a legacy system (as I do) you would probably have upgraded to
> IRIX 6.5 anyway.
> (Actually it turns out that I wasn't entirely correct in what I wrote
> earlier - the SGI freeware version of Perl for IRIX 6.5 is still at
> 5.6.1, because they stopped updating that repository. There's another
> 3party semi-official repo for IRIX now, not hosted by SGI, but I'm not
> familiar with it.
> 
There are currently 2 maintained options for IRIX users:
nekochan (requires IRIX 6.5.21 or better)
tgcware (IRIX 5.3 & 6.2, will also run on 6.3, 6.4, 6.5).

I maintain tgcware and have prebuilt git packages available (1.7.2.3).

Git does not build on IRIX < 6.3 without adding some sort of thirdparty 
(v)snprintf code since those functions are missing in libc. I use the 
ctrio library for this purpose.

-tgc