[Koha-devel] Perl // operator

[MJ Ray]

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