On 1 Jan 2018, at 14:55 (-0500), Craig Treleaven wrote:
On Dec 31, 2017, at 11:46 PM, Bill Cole
<[email protected]> wrote:
Ah, so apparently the reason this met total silence was that it got
lost/dropped somewhere so only I thought it was posted. Odd...
Reposted message:
From: Bill Cole <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: What's the push to require the latest Perl?
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2017 18:00:20 -0500
In regards to https://trac.macports.org/ticket/55208 :
In doing pre-upgrade due diligence I ran across this:
# port rdeps p5.24-net-dns
The following ports are dependencies of p5.24-net-dns @1.140.0_0:
perl5.24
[...]
p5.24-net-libidn2
libidn2
pkgconfig
autoconf
xz
automake
libtool
xattr
unzip
libunistring
perl5
texinfo
help2man
perl5.26
p5.26-locale-gettext
That seems unhelpful... Why would help2man demand the absolute latest
Perl? Well, because the Portfile says it does. However, in the real
world, help2man is happy with any perl since 5.8.
Doing a 'port -y upgrade outdated' reveals that multiple ports are
threatening to demand perl5.26 if I try to upgrade them, like whois!?
Because it needs perl to build???
This is insanity. Can anyone convince me otherwise or even explain
how this hasn't led to an angry mob with torches and pitchforks?
Because I have one of each if anyone wants to join the revolt…
I’m not the best to explain the situation, but the issue basically
comes down to manpower. We have many thousands of ports and not all
that many active maintainers.
Understood. Always a problem in the FOSS world. I'd like to be able to
offer help but cannot responsibly do so currently. I am grateful that
there are people who can do so.
It is felt that supporting multiple Perl versions drains resources
that would be better spent keeping up to date. Especially since older
versions are no longer supported upstream or even receiving critical
security fixes.
Note that 5.24 still will be supported upstream for a few months.
Hopefully all the issues with 5.26 in modules I rely on will be fixed
before 5.28 comes out. Updating my whole Perl world is not an option
quite yet.
Since most users receive and install pre-compiled binaries, it
doesn’t present a big burden when they upgrade.
Not everyone can do that. It would help if I could, since eliminating
build dependencies greatly reduces the places in the dependency forest
where the Perl core will get upgraded as a dependency.
Should a user be concerned about old versions wasting disk space, the
port reclaim command is available to pare things down.
Disk space is not the problem. Here's the problem:
***There is no canonical documented process for cleanly updating the
MacPorts Perl universe and specifying only the latest Perl version in
dependencies appears at first encounter to make that universe
fragile.***
After some experimentation on a non-critical system, it seems now that
my alarm over seeing 5.26 dragged in was not so justified, because it
doesn't grab the /opt/local/bin/perl{,5} symlinks. So the existing
working 5.24 world is apparently safe from damage until I switch the
perl5 port to the 5.26 variant. It seems. I still haven't worked out an
upgrade process any better than I've used in the past: feeding the list
of p5.x-* ports into a script that installs the new version of each one
then switching the symlinks by switching the perl5 variant and finally
removing all the old versions.
Has the MacPorts core team considered the implementation of an analog to
the FreeBSD 'UPDATING' file? Having a reference for updates that require
special procedures would make it less likely that users are startled by
updates they aren't really prepared for.
As the home page says: "We provide a single software tree that
attempts to track the latest release of every software title (port) we
distribute”. Note the _latest release_ part.
Yeah, but it isn't really feasible to always use the latest Perl or any
other language whose ecosystem is the product of many independent module
authors.
--
Bill Cole
[email protected] or [email protected]
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Currently Seeking Steady Work: https://linkedin.com/in/billcole
