Re: Let's bump the minimum Perl version to 5.8
- From
- Tor Arntsen <tor@spacetec.no>
- Date
- Sep 24, 2010, 14:08 UTC
- Message-ID
- <AANLkTimNGZom6FfKivg=QNmovz=xf656XHbXCmsjfrxD@mail.gmail.com>
- In-Reply-To
- <AANLkTim8aPoOkzzf4c0JHbBDVa4zJY2xM3v9fXQ-px=V@mail.gmail.com>
On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 15:32, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> wrote:
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> 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).
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>> 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.
> Perl is very portable with people willing to port it, the main > limitation is usually that porters don't have access to obscure > systems, not that there isn't interest.
People interested in installing Git will probably first want to look for a pre-made package, and, if not, build it themselves. At that point, however, they would probably give up if it turns out they have to start building the underlying stuff (e.g. Perl) themselves too, so I tend to look for the lowest common denominator for 3party packages (e.g. 5.8 if we can get away with it, not 5.10). IRIX 6.5 is a bit unfortunate in this though. IRIX 6.2 can be considered an unlikely corner case.
-Tor