Re: Oldest supported Perl version

["H.Merijn Brand" <h.m.brand@xs4all.nl>]

On Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:59:00 -0400, Jay Soffian <jaysoffian@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 9:58 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> > Sorry, I should have checked myself.  defined-or "//" is 5.8.1 or later.

Being the maintainer of the defined-or patch for perl 5.8, I can
short-circuit this

* defined-or (//) is officially available from perl-5.10.0 and up
  you can be *sure* to have it there. the 'err' keyword that was the
  low-precedence version for // is gone.

* defined-or is available in any version of perl 5.8.x is the binary
  was built with the appropriate patch, which is available on my CPAN
  directory:
  ftp://download.xs4all.nl/pub/mirror/CPAN/authors/id/H/HM/HMBRAND/
  These patches still include the 'err' keyword

* defined-or is definitely NOT available in 5.6.x

All my perl-5.8.x builds include this patch, so all people that use my
perl builds on HP-UX, will have it available.

One major distribution also included it in their perl builds, but I do
not remember which it is.

My personal preference for the lowest usable and reliable perl version
is 5.8.5 (FWIW)

> > Now the real question was if we still support anything older, and if so
> > what is the bottom version?
> >
> > I certainly can go with "5.8.1 or later", but I vaguely recall during the
> > gitweb discussion we said anything without the utf-8 support is unusable
> > for gitweb, but I think we also said that the rest of the git codebase
> > should support running with something older (5.6.1, perhaps).
> 
> 15 minutes of research:
> 
> * 2006-06-25 Junio C Hamano: "Tentatively let's say our cut-off point is
>   somewhere around 5.6." --
>   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/22607
> 
> * 2008-05-30 Lea Wiemann: "Gitweb relies on Unicode support (e.g. "use
>   Encode") and will continue to be compatible with 5.8 and 5.10 only" --
>   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/83339
> 
> * 2008-08-13 Lea Wiemann: "This makes Git.pm dependent on Perl 5.6.1. Some
>   tests (like t3701-add-interactive.sh) seem to work with pretty much any Perl
>   version out there, and requiring File::Spec changes this" --
>   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/92260
> 
> * 2008-08-15 Marcus Griep: "Git.pm: Make File::Spec and File::Temp requirement
>   lazy" -- c14c8ce
> 
> * 2008-08-30 Junio C Hamano: "I agree we should say we rely on 5.6 or newer."
>   -- http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/94399
> 
> * 2008-09-01 Junio C Hamano: "I personally think it is probably Ok to declare
>   that we do depend on 5.8" --
>   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/94523
> 
> 
> So here's my take-away. For the *.perl scripts and gitweb, it's 5.8.0. For the
> test suite and Git.pm, all Perl versions are theoretically supported, but for
> practical purposes, it may be 5.6.0.
> 
> Whatever is decided this time, perhaps it should be burned into the tops of
> the *.perl scripts (i.e. "require 5.008;"). It should also be added to
> CodingGuidelines. You know, so this conversation doesn't keep recurring. :-)

-- 
H.Merijn Brand  http://tux.nl      Perl Monger  http://amsterdam.pm.org/
using & porting perl 5.6.2, 5.8.x, 5.10.x, 5.11.x on HP-UX 10.20, 11.00,
11.11, 11.23, and 11.31, OpenSuSE 10.3, 11.0, and 11.1, AIX 5.2 and 5.3.
http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/           http://www.test-smoke.org/
http://qa.perl.org      http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/