From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2010 14:04:08 GMT Subject: Re: Let's bump the minimum Perl version to 5.8 Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <86pqw3uuba.fsf@red.stonehenge.com> On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 13:47, Randal L. Schwartz wrote: >>>>>> "Ævar" == Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason writes: > > 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; Right, except that should be `use 5.008`. Since you don't want to run anything else within an implicit or explicit BEGIN block before perl fails on that. E.g. `require 5.008; use Digest::MD5;` would just spew an error about Digest::MD5. The only reason you'd want `require $version' is if you care about 5.005, but even then you can do `BEGIN { require 5.008 }`.