[Koha-devel] Koha now requires Perl 5.20

[David Cook]

My proposal would be to first revert https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=20104.

 

As for minimum Perl versions, I think we’d want to be really careful about that, since we do have a global community of users running different underlying systems for different reasons.

 

If we’re concerned about the Perl version, I’d say add a “buyer beware” warning saying that Koha is developed to be used on Perl 5.20 on X, Y, Z Debian-based distribution. 

 

If there really is a feature that is only available in Perl 5.20+, then I think we’d need to consider whether or not it is vital to the future of Koha. If it is, I think we’d need to make some pretty big announcements saying that Koha cannot work correctly on older systems. 

 

Basically, I prefer warnings over errors, and providing systems people with as much information as we can. 

 

David Cook

Systems Librarian

Prosentient Systems

72/330 Wattle St

Ultimo, NSW 2007

Australia

 

Office: 02 9212 0899

Direct: 02 8005 0595

 

From: Tomas Cohen Arazi [mailto:tomascohen at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, 17 April 2018 12:11 PM
To: David Cook <dcook at prosentient.com.au>
Cc: koha-devel at lists.koha-community.org
Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] Koha now requires Perl 5.20

 

What's your proposal?

El lun., 16 de abr. de 2018 10:42 p. m., David Cook <dcook at prosentient.com.au <mailto:dcook at prosentient.com.au> > escribió:

Hi all,

 

I just tried to work on Koha master on OpenSUSE 42.3, which was released on 2017-07-26, but I’m being prevented from installing Koha, because OpenSUSE 42.3 uses Perl 5.18.2 rather than Perl 5.20. 

 

I tracked the change back to https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=20104. The claim was that C4::Log::cronlogaction uses caller and that caller doesn’t exist before Perl 5.20, but that’s not true. The caller function has been in Perl for an extremely long time. You can find it in RHEL 6.9 which uses Perl 5.10. I just used it in Perl 5.18.2. So that doesn’t seem like a good justification for requiring a minimum version of Perl 5.20.

 

I have a feeling that this change is going to bite other people developing and using Koha around the world. There are people running Koha on openSUSE, Suse Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Red Hat, CentOS… probably other distros as well. Are we really going to exclude everyone that doesn’t use recent Debian-based distros from using newer versions of Koha?

 

It seems to me that this decision was made without community discussion. Maybe I’m wrong, but I figured I’d bring it up with everyone. 

 

For my part, I’m just going to hack around this requirement for now, but I don’t really like that as a long-term solution. 

 

What does everyone else think?

 

David Cook

Systems Librarian

Prosentient Systems

72/330 Wattle St

Ultimo, NSW 2007

Australia

 

Office: 02 9212 0899

Direct: 02 8005 0595

 

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