Re: Time to drop support for Perl 5.8?

On Sun, Mar 23, 2014 at 1:59 PM, Benedict White <..hidden..> wrote:

On 23/03/14 09:18, Chris Travers wrote:

Hi everyone;

Perl is moving onward and many modules have Perl 5.8 support only provisionally (Moose for example, already has a stated policy of only support 5.8 on a best effort basis). Perl 5.10 has a number of additional features we might want to use over time and by not be stuck with 5.8 ways of doing things.

I would like to suggest a policy going forward of bumping up the major Perl version once a year or so, starting with 5.10 for 1.5.

Arch Linux is on 5.18, so no objection. I suppose it depends on what shipping distros are using. I can't see there is much point in supporting a distro that hasn't been shipped for a couple of years.

Perl 5.8 was released in 2008 and 5.10 in 2009. If supporting them presents a large issue, I can't see why LedgerSMB should.

Current stable Debian (Wheezy) has 5.14. That's still a lot newer than 5.10, where Debian is known to be pretty laggy on adopting software into stable. By that measure I think we should benchmark against RHEL 6, not 5.

Although one could argue that we're developing to be included in distro releases. In that case, we should be targetting RHEL 7, which probably comes with a Perl version much newer than 5.10. I'm not entirely sure what the goal is though. I can see why our users might want to use LSMB right now and not wait for the next release of their favorite distro to be released.

Bye,

Erik.

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