[Koha-devel] Perl 5.18

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 7:43 AM, Tomas Cohen Arazi <tomascohen at gmail.com> wrote:
> The latest Ubuntu LTS release includes Perl 5.18. One of the main noticeable
> consequences of this is that some 5.10 features are now marked as
> experimental, and hence warnings appear everywhere.
>
> One example could be the use of '~~' (C4/Search.pm:536). These warnings can
> be avoided using the following pragma [1]:
>
> no if $] >= 5.018, 'warnings', "experimental::feature_name";

In my view, we should not use the pragma to hide the warning messages
-- we should remove use of the experimental constructs, including the
smartmatch operator.  There have already been a couple recent-ish
patches pushed [1] to remove uses of smartmatch.

This is because, as the link you included in your email states,
features that the Perl developers have marked as experimental are
subject to change, which could lead to surprises as future versions of
Perl get released.

I have opened a new bug [2] for removing the remaining uses of the
smartmatch operator, and I suggest that we add a new coding guideline
to this effect:

=== PERL19: The use of the Perl smartmatch operator is forbidden ===

The Perl smartmatch operator, including ~~ and given/when, has been
[http://perldoc.perl.org/5.18.0/perldelta.html#The-smartmatch-family-of-features-are-now-experimental
marked experimental] as of Perl 5.18.0.   Since the meaning of the
smartmatch operator is subject to change, and since using it will by
default add warnings to the error log, new code should not use it.

[1] Bugs 11468 and 11479
[2] http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=12151

Regards,

Galen
-- 
Galen Charlton
Manager of Implementation
Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
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