Re: Oldest supported Perl version

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

On Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:59:14 -0700 (PDT), Jakub Narebski
<jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

> Jay Soffian <jaysoffian@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 9:58 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > 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).
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Errr... no.  For gitweb we require good Unicode support, which means
> Perl 5.8.x (IIRC 5.8.1).  For all other: commands (and helpers)

Unicode? 5.8.4 or up. Most desirable 5.8.5
5.8.1 is the worst distribution ever.

ask purl on irc :
 <Tux> purl, perl-5.8.1?
<purl> i guess perl-5.8.1 is made from blood, sweat, tears, coffee and single malt

> written in Perl like git-svn, fragments of Perl in test suite (because
> of incompatibility and corner cases of shell scripting) - with possible
> exception of testing gitweb, and Git.pm (which some commands in Perl
> use) I think it is reasonable to expect 5.6.0 at least.

5.6.1 or 5.8.5

> > 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/