Howdy, First, thanks to everyone for the quick responses to my bug report.
> The output format of "perl -v" has been reasonably consistent for well > over a decade, eg (examples captured from various machines around my > house) > > This is perl, version 4.0 > This is perl, v5.8.7 built for PA-RISC2.0 > This is perl, v5.10.0 built for darwin-thread-multi-2level > > Why did 5.11 feel a need to go off in a new direction? They haven't > added any actual new information AFAICS, just made it harder to parse. Perl 5 recently changed their VCS to git, and to allow for reporting that someone is running a non-release development version, they tweaked their version output slightly. >>> This is not a path towards an acceptable solution, as it effectively >>> assumes what we are setting out to prove, namely that we have found >>> a reasonably modern version of perl. Try it in perl 4... > >> These words don't seem to make sense. Can you translate? > > Which part of "it doesn't work in perl 4" is not clear to you? > Yes, I'm aware that it *fails* in perl 4, but it doesn't produce > an error message that would be helpful to a non Perl hacker: You got me. I forgot that 'use' is not in Perl 4. But the error is not going to be seen my the end user, is it? I thought the purpose of the script was to be executed by ./configure and depending on whether it exits successfully or not, you know if you have the proper version of perl. Am I misunderstanding something? > > $ /usr/local/bin/perl4 -e 'use 5.008001;' > syntax error in file /tmp/perl-ea01429 at line 1, next 2 tokens "use 5.008001" > Execution of /tmp/perl-ea01429 aborted due to compilation errors. > > That isn't going to lead to people realizing that they need a newer > Perl, it's just going to lead to bug reports --- sent to *us*. > I am not prepared to compromise one inch on the clarity of the error > message put out by configure. I totally agree with you that clarity of error messages are very important. I think a hybrid approach will work well: first check for Perl 5, then use the proposed method by Tim. If Perl 5 is not found, then some loud message can be printed out, like: Postgres only works with Perl version X.X.X and higher (or somesuch) Duke -- Jonathan "Duke" Leto jonat...@leto.net http://leto.net -- Sent via pgsql-bugs mailing list (pgsql-bugs@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-bugs
