On Sun, Dec 24 2017, Jeff King jotted: > On Sat, Dec 23, 2017 at 05:44:00PM +0000, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote: > >> This is similar to Jeff King's jk/drop-ancient-curl series in that >> we're dropping perl releases that are rarely tested anymore, however >> unlike those patches git still works on e.g. 5.8.8 (I couldn't build >> anything older). > > Heh, I'm not sure if those are the best prior art to justify this, since > I stopped posting them after getting complaints (though I'll admit I was > considering re-posting them since AFAICT nobody has stepped up to fix > the breakage after many months).
Less of a justification, more of a "this is going to be a similar sort of dumpster fire" :) > This may be more like the recent C99 weather-balloon patches, in that > we're not using the new features yet, but want to see if anybody screams > at this first change. > >> The reason to do this is to be able to use features released with perl >> in the last decade, 5.10 was a major feature release including things >> like new regex features, state variables, the defined-or operator >> etc.[3] >> >> I expect this to be more controversial as since the 5.8 release stayed >> along for longer in various distributions, e.g. it's the version >> shipped with RHEL 5, replaced by 5.10 in RHEL 6 released in late 2010, >> similarly the first Debian release to include 5.10 was 5.0 (Lenny) >> released in early 2009. The release history for other distributions >> can be seen on CPAN's "Perl Binaries" page[3]. > > As far as this actual perl change goes, I don't have a strong opinion. I > agree it would be nice to eventually move forward, and your reasoning > about what constitutes "old" seems sane. But we also don't write much > perl in this project these days, and I don't see a lack of modern perl > features causing a lot of headaches. Yes, unlike with the curl patches it's not a big PITA to maintain compatibility with 5.8, it would just be easier to write new code & maintain old code and not have to be on guard about not using features one takes for grantend, and maintain compatibility with 5.8 versions of core modules.
