diff mbox series

[12/13] INSTALL: require Perl 5.26.0

Message ID 20241010235621.738239-13-sandals@crustytoothpaste.net (mailing list archive)
State Superseded
Headers show
Series Update versions of libcurl and Perl | expand

Commit Message

brian m. carlson Oct. 10, 2024, 11:56 p.m. UTC
Our platform support policy states that we require "versions of
dependencies which are generally accepted as stable and supportable,
e.g., in line with the version used by other long-term-support
distributions".  Of Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, and SLES, the four most common
distributions that provide LTS versions, the version with mainstream
long-term security support with the oldest Perl is 5.26.0 in SLES 15.6.

This is a major upgrade, since Perl 5.8.1, according to the Perl
documentation, was released in September of 2003.  It brings a lot of
new features that we can choose to use, such as s///r to return the
modified string, the postderef functionality, and subroutine signatures,
although the latter was still considered experimental until 5.36.

Update the INSTALL file to reflect our new dependency requirement.

Signed-off-by: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
---
 INSTALL | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

Comments

Oswald Buddenhagen Oct. 11, 2024, 9:38 a.m. UTC | #1
On Thu, Oct 10, 2024 at 11:56:20PM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:
>Update the INSTALL file to reflect our new dependency requirement.
>
any particular reason not to squash this into the parent commit?
i see how the separation makes sense for the libcurl sub-series, but
that doesn't seem applicable here.

regarding the actual `use` statements, you could make them somewhat more
legible by using 'v5.26' as the version number.

another aspect to consider is that the statement doesn't just specify
the minimal version, but also subtly changes behavior. for example, the
`use strict;` statements become redundant.

cf. https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/use#use-VERSION

lastly, it would be nice to update the build systems to reflect the
version requirements. though the only pre-existing version check i found
is the libcurl one in contrib/buildsystems/CMakeLists.txt.
brian m. carlson Oct. 15, 2024, 10:48 p.m. UTC | #2
On 2024-10-11 at 09:38:38, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 10, 2024 at 11:56:20PM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:
> > Update the INSTALL file to reflect our new dependency requirement.
> > 
> any particular reason not to squash this into the parent commit?
> i see how the separation makes sense for the libcurl sub-series, but
> that doesn't seem applicable here.

Sure, I can do that.

> regarding the actual `use` statements, you could make them somewhat more
> legible by using 'v5.26' as the version number.
> 
> another aspect to consider is that the statement doesn't just specify
> the minimal version, but also subtly changes behavior. for example, the
> `use strict;` statements become redundant.
> 
> cf. https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/use#use-VERSION

Yes, I'll change that to a require v5.26 instead, since my goal isn't to
change the behaviour.

> lastly, it would be nice to update the build systems to reflect the
> version requirements. though the only pre-existing version check i found
> is the libcurl one in contrib/buildsystems/CMakeLists.txt.

I don't build with cmake, so I can't speak to the requirements for it.
It doesn't actually work on Unix as far as I know, and I don't run
Windows at all.
diff mbox series

Patch

diff --git a/INSTALL b/INSTALL
index 6e0321ff0e..54d7528f9e 100644
--- a/INSTALL
+++ b/INSTALL
@@ -119,7 +119,7 @@  Issues of note:
 	- A POSIX-compliant shell is required to run some scripts needed
 	  for everyday use (e.g. "bisect", "request-pull").
 
-	- "Perl" version 5.8.1 or later is needed to use some of the
+	- "Perl" version 5.26.0 or later is needed to use some of the
 	  features (e.g. sending patches using "git send-email",
 	  interacting with svn repositories with "git svn").  If you can
 	  live without these, use NO_PERL.  Note that recent releases of