Date: Tue, 19 Nov 1996 14:00:19 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: roberto@keltia.freenix.fr (Ollivier Robert) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Who needs Perl? We do! Message-ID: <199611192100.OAA09524@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <Mutt.19961119210759.roberto@keltia.freenix.fr> from "Ollivier Robert" at Nov 19, 96 09:07:59 pm
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> > FreeBSD. People are *always* complaining "why don't you upgrade your > > PERL?", even when it it well known that an upgrade frequently requires > > updating all of the PERL-dependent scripts to the new syntax, since > > the syntax is not sufficiently stable. > > Between Perl4 and Perl5, the changes are documented in perltrap. Between > 5.x there have been very few syntaxic changes. You won't notice many > changes between 5.003 and 5.004 in that respect. I realize this. However, it requires going over your existing PERL code to make sure it doesn't break from the syntactical changes. The problem is the dependencies for the existing code, and that fact that if the maintainers of the code haven't "upgraded", then we become promary support for the "upgraded" scripts. This would have been less of a problem in the 5.x changeover if the PERL distribution had a tool to upgrade scripts over the syntactic changes. > > For FreeBSD, the biggest problem is PERL dependent ports and MajorDomo; > > PERL upgrades have been delayed for MajorDomo more than once in the > > past. > > Majordomo has been Perl5 compatible as of 1.93. 1.94 runs fine under it. What was the delay between when people started saying we should upgrade to PERL 5.x and the release of MajorDomo 1.93? The problem, again, is that the change cycle on PERL has historically been too short to base a FreeBSD release on a PERL release... PERL is moving faster than FreeBSD, in other words. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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