Re: Gitweb caching: Google Summer of Code project

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

"J.H." <warthog19@eaglescrag.net> writes:

> On Fri, 2008-05-30 at 18:04 +0200, Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote:
>> 2008/5/30 Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz>:
>> >
>> > Wow, and here I was wondering if requiring at least 5.6 was not too
>> > liberal. ;-) I believe 5.8 is the newest possible candidate though, it
>> > is still too widespread; e.g. Debian-wise, many servers run on Etch and
>> > are going to stay there even for quite some time after Lenny gets
>> > released. Heck, I still have accounts on plenty of Sarge machines. ;-)
>> > (Sarge seems to have Perl-5.8.4.)
>> 
>> I think 5.8.2 is a good _minimum_ perl to support. Before that one,
>> Unicode support is next to null (5.6 and below) or too buggy, and
>> gitweb needs that.

> I would agree - lets try and shoot for 5.8 as a baseline minimum (there
> are lots of people who are slow to upgrade, and it would be nice to be
> able for them to make use of newer gitweb's on things like Centos / RHEL
> 4

I do not think it is unreasonable to require recent Perl for a machine
that runs gitweb, as it is not something you would run on your "customer
site that needs to be ultra sta(b)le" nor on your "development machine
that needs to run the same version as that ultra sta(b)le customer
installation."  In other words, gitweb is primarily a developer tool, and
you can assume that people can afford to have a dedicated machine they can
update its Perl to recent version.

However, introducing dependency on 5.8 to any and all Git.pm users may
have a much wider impact.  Right now, these "use Git":

    git-add--interactive.perl
    git-cvsexportcommit.perl
    git-send-email.perl
    git-svn.perl

If you are doing development for some customer application whose end
product needs to land on a machine with a pre-5.8 Perl, it is conceivable
that you may pin the Perl running on that development machine to that old
version, say 5.6.  Introducing 5.8 dependency to Git.pm in such a way that
"use Git" from these fail might make these people somewhat unhappy.