Marc Chantreux wrote:
On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 04:51:23PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
It's not very clear, but http://www.cpan.org/src/README.html seems to say that 5.8 is still supported.
perl stable version is 5.12, not even 5.10 (released on December 18, 2007).
5.8 (last maintenance release: December 14, 2008) is "maintained". it doesn't mean "you should use it" but "if you have perl legacy scripts to run on a old system, we carre about it".
Yes, I know all that, but 5.8 has not been end-of-lifed like 5.6 yet, has it? It's in the same "maintained" status as 5.10, it appears.
plus! most of us still use a 5.10 interpreter so we can't provide a any serious waranty to be 5.8 compliant as long as we haven't a test suite with large coverage running on a perlbrewed 5.8.
So "use 5.008_006;" wouldn't warn you when you exceed it? Ouch.
is there a *real* reason to take us away from all new perl features ?
World domination! 5.8 is still a bigger potential user base. The most conspicuous laggard is MacOS X 10.6 which I think has perl 5.10.0 but built in a way that MARC::Charset doesn't like. Happily, it also has some version of 5.8. I wouldn't recommend running Koha on MacOS X, but some people do and I don't understand why we should drop them for the sake of replacing a few defined-s and things like that with less readable alternatives. As I wrote before, I'm fine with whatever Chris decides on 3.4, but 5.8 support should remain in 3.2 and 3.0. Hope that explains, -- MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op. Past Koha Release Manager (2.0), LMS programmer, statistician, webmaster. In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Available for hire for Koha work http://www.software.coop/products/koha