Right now, automake officially requires at least Perl 5.005. Perl 5.005_03 will be 5 years old next month, and supporting it is becoming painful.
The 1.8 release had a bug that caused it to fail with Perl 5.005_03 and despite numerous beta releases, it was only reported later. Recently it was reported that in some conditions, aclocal 1.8.2 will call a function that was introduced only in Perl 5.6. Reinventing the wheel each time this happens is time consuming. I'm considering dropping support for Perl 5.005 in the future Automake 1.9, and require at least Perl 5.6. Perl 5.6 will be 4 years old next month, so it does not sound like asking for the moon. How many people would be annoyed by this? Is there any reason why this would be a very bad idea? I know some people are still using 5.005_03. We'd have never noticed the aforementioned breakages otherwise. However I do not know why they do. Is there any reason why upgrading to newer Perl versions would be undesirable? PS: I'd still fix Perl 5.005_03 issues in 1.8.x. -- Alexandre Duret-Lutz
