Re: [PATCH] change Perl syntax to support Perl 5.6

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

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

> Ask Bjørn Hansen <ask@develooper.com> writes:
> ...
>>> This is an alternative to my previous patch that just declared Perl
>>> 5.8 to
>>> be the required version.
>>
>> +1 to that one.
>
> Now, would somebody volunteer to go everywhere our user base (who no
> longer read Release Notes) hang around, post a message saying that some
> people on git development list are proposing to drop Perl 5.6 support, and
> if the proposal goes ahead, it is possible that the next release may force
> upgrading Perl for them, to make sure they won't complain saying they've
> never heard about the "incompatible change" beforehand?

Just in case before anybody overreacts without reading the mailing list
backlog; the above is meant to be a moderately bitter joke ;-)

I tend to think that everybody who needs to run git in their development
environment (the deployment site could be running with ancient Perl for
all we care --- after all, git or any SCM is primarily to be run in the
development environment, and even if people use git to transfer the end
result from the development side, all they need is the really core part of
history tranfer tools like fetch, push and checkout on the deployed site;
these tools do not depend on Perl) would be running 5.8 by now.  Granted,
some development machine need to have the exact same version of everything
as the intended deployment environment for testing purposes, and some
people may be developing a piece of software that is meant to run on Perl
that is no more recent than 5.6, but with virtual machines and all, I
think it would be rare to have such a setup --- it is a lot easier to
develop on a platform with more reasonably recent Perl that your
development tools (not limited to git itself) may depend on, and test on a
virtual bochs with an ancient software configuration as the intended
deployment site.

So I personally think it is probably Ok to declare that we do depend on
5.8.