Re: [ANNOUNCE] Git v2.0.0-rc0

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 22, 2014, 22:47 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqbnvt2d7v.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20140422222519.GC144079@vauxhall.crustytoothpaste.net>

"brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> writes:

Show 12 quoted lines

> On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 03:11:48PM -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>> Another possibility would be to require Perl 5.8.9 or newer.  It was
>> released in 2008.
>
> RHEL 5 and CentOS 5 are still shipping with 5.8.8.  They are still
> security-supported until 2017, and believe it or not people still
> develop on them.  I am personally fine with this change, though.
>
> What we could do instead is simply require a newer version of
> Getopt::Long, which would let people continue using their ancient OSes
> and install a newer version from CPAN if necessary.  It's also the
> proper way to specify the dependency.

Yes, but if its inability to properly grok --option="" is the only reason we want to add a dependency, wouldn't it suffice to simply state in the documentation (1) how to recognise the symptom to see if the version the user has is too old, e.g. "if you see this error message", "run 'perl -v' to see if your perl is older than X", etc. and (2) how to work it around, i.e. "instead of giving an empty value with --option='', say --option ''"?