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Date:      Mon, 03 Apr 2000 11:59:17 -0400
From:      "Jeroen C. van Gelderen" <jeroen@vangelderen.org>
To:        Nick Hibma <n_hibma@calcaphon.com>
Cc:        Christopher Masto <chris@netmonger.net>, Chuck Robey <chuckr@picnic.mat.net>, "Thomas T. Veldhouse" <veldy@veldy.net>, FreeBSD-Current <freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Perl 5.6.0?
Message-ID:  <38E8BFD5.3E69DF2A@vangelderen.org>
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.20.0004031050131.9381-100000@localhost>

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Nick Hibma wrote:
> Are there actually any good reasons why we _should_ upgrade in the first
> place? Security fixes, added functionality we require, etc. The perl we
> have is stable and the problems it has are well known, which is good
> enough in 99% of the cases.

PERL is not just used by the FreeBSD system, it's also used by many
applications ran on top of FreeBSD. Those applications are more likely
to require an up-to-date version of PERL. We for one need the (overly
late) 64-bit support in PERL.

You could of course force users to install the latest PERL locally and
fiddle with $PATH but this would amount to hacking around a deficiency
in FreeBSD. If FreeBSD needs an older version of PERL for it's own use,
it should provide something like 'perl_freebsd' or 'system_perl' so that
'perl' can always be up2date.

Later Anton Berezin wrote:
> Historical evidence suggests there will be 5.6.1 *very* soon, and 5.6.2
> shortly after that.  Let's wait a couple of months before jumping on
> this vagon...  :-)   5.6.0 will almost surely prove to have far too many
> problems to include it into FreeBSD source tree.

Problems in a dot-zero release are a very good argument against
importing PERL 5.6.0 now. 

Of course it would be even better to just import PERL4 again and force
everybody to use Python, but that's another religious war ;-/

Cheers,
Jeroen


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