Re: Let's bump the minimum Perl version to 5.8

Ævar> Since we're not getting patches for common things that have been Ævar> broken on 5.6 for years and bumping the requirenment to an 8 year old Ævar> perl (5.8) instead of a 10 year old one (5.6) would make things much Ævar> easier, including:

Ævar>  * Fixing the perl/ Makefile mess

Ævar>  * Being able to use 5.8 features

Ævar> * Being able to honestly support the 5.8 release, 5.6 doesn't even Ævar> compile on modern systems without undocumented monkeypatches, and Ævar> few people use it so we don't get fixes for it.

Ævar> I'd like to propose dropping 5.6 support, and move to say 5.008. I can Ævar> do the work required to add appropriate docs / use statements and Ævar> fixes to bugs that we can't fix on 5.6.

As the token resident Perl expert, I'd be completely fine with that. Sane choice.

It might be useful to document that by adding:

  require 5.008;

at the beginning of each file that presumes it, as you get around to editing it.

That way, Perl won't even try to run it if it's too old.