From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Oct 7 00:32:33 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7EEAF16A4CE for ; Thu, 7 Oct 2004 00:32:33 +0000 (GMT) Received: from electra.nolink.net (electra.nolink.net [195.139.204.207]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8930043D31 for ; Thu, 7 Oct 2004 00:32:32 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from lerik@nolink.net) Received: (qmail 60528 invoked by uid 1000); 7 Oct 2004 00:32:31 -0000 Received: from localhost (sendmail-bs@127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 7 Oct 2004 00:32:31 -0000 Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2004 02:32:31 +0200 (CEST) From: Lars Erik Gullerud To: Ryan Newman Message-ID: <20041007023157.Q60121@electra.nolink.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: perl 5.8.5 X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 07 Oct 2004 00:32:33 -0000 On Wed, 6 Oct 2004, Ryan Newman wrote: >> Even though I have hit some of these problems, I do think it is a >> good idea to make the change to 5.8 as part of FreeBSD 5.3-release. >> People should be taking a bit more time to check, cross-check, and >> re-check everything they are running if they are upgrading to >> 5.3-release from 4.x-release. >> > > Having 5.3 default to perl 5.8 will add a lot of delay in several peoples > migration from 4.x for sure. Uh, I don't really understand this argument at all. I happen to be one of the "lucky" people administering a couple of huge, complex, perl-based applications, currently running on 4-STABLE servers and perl 5.6 from ports. These are systems that are inherited after mergers, and none of the original developers are available anymore. They are also written with a lot of sloppy perl code, and break rather spectacularly with 5.8, which seems to be a lot more strict in checking certain types of syntax. Now, since people around here tend to value their sanity (and therefore also mostly use Python, C or PHP), nobody really wants to touch these apps until they are phased out and replaced sometime in the next couple of years. However, one of the big differences between 4.x and 5.x is that perl is not in the base system on 5.x but rather just a package - therefore I actually consider it EASIER to move these systems to new servers on 5.x than moving them to new boxes on 4.x. If perl 5.8 is the default, well, pkg_delete it and add 5.6, problem solved. If I can select 5.6 directly from sysinstall, even easier. I don't really care what sysinstall tries to do by default. Since said systems are very CPU-intensive and threaded, we eagerly anticipate 5.3-RELEASE to take advantage of the new SMP code - I've already set aside a lot of testing time over the next few weeks to play with lifting these apps over to a 5.3-BETA/RC and measure the performance on some multi-CPU Xeon systems, and hopefully keep these apps running until their replacements are in place - since "throwing hardware at the problem" has really been taken to its limits on their current 4-STABLE incarnations. /leg