Re: Dropping support for older perl

From: Tom G. Christensen <tgc@jupiterrise.com>
Date: Aug 10, 2017, 10:04 UTC
Message-ID: <69dba5a3-b9e5-15b2-ca7c-8720da6c3b62@jupiterrise.com>
In-Reply-To: <87zib8g8ub.fsf@gmail.com>

On 09/08/17 15:38, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> RHEL/CentOS 5.x has perl 5.8.8, but it also has curl 7.15.5[1] which is
> obseleted by these curl patches. Maybe we'd want to be more conservative
> with perl for whatever reason, but I'd like to at least bump our
> requirenment of 5.8.0 to 5.8.8. Those releases are 4 years apart, and a
> lot of bugs were fixed[2], and some constructs / modules have newer APIs
> we could use.
> 
> But if we do the thing corresponding to these curl patches we should
> bump the dependency to 5.10.1, that was released in August 2009 (and the
> curl version JK is bumping us to in March 2009), and 5.10.1 is shipped
> with RHEL/CentOS 6.
>

I agree with your thoughts. Though I'm a bit biased since I only really care about RHEL/CentOS in the context of being able to use vendor provided versions of curl and perl.

> The bump to 5.10.1 may be a bad idea, I know AIX/HPUX/Solaris and some
> others have historically been more conservative about upgrading perl
> than stuff like libcurl since it's in the base system.
>

AFAIK it used to be common to build updated versions at least on Solaris. I provide perl 5.16.x and a recent curl for Solaris 2.6-9 as part of tgcware(1) and Solaris 10/11 users can use OpenCSW which seems to have 5.10.1 available.

-tgc

1) https://jupiterrise.com/tgcware/