[Koha-devel] Koha now requires Perl 5.20

[David Cook]

Hi Jonathan,

 

Thanks for reverting that patch. 

 

We have Koha running on a RHEL 6 instance which uses 5.10.1, and it seems to be doing fine so far. It is an older version of Koha though. I just did the following grep: grep -R "use 5\." *. I see “use 5.010” but nothing greater than that. 

 

I don’t think there’s really much that is special about installing Koha on OpenSUSE per se. We just do a source install and use a combination of vendor packages and CPAN modules to meet the required dependencies. (Actually, we now do RPM builds that match a particular structure that we used when we just did source installs by hand.) I could take a look at the wiki though.

 

David Cook

Systems Librarian

Prosentient Systems

72/330 Wattle St

Ultimo, NSW 2007

Australia

 

Office: 02 9212 0899

Direct: 02 8005 0595

 

From: Jonathan Druart [mailto:jonathan.druart at bugs.koha-community.org] 
Sent: Tuesday, 17 April 2018 8:58 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

 

Hi David,

I did not confirm Mark's assumption on pushing but made sure 5.20 was available in most of the GNU/Linux distros I know.

If this restriction is not necessary it does not make sense to keep it, I am going to revert the patch later today.

However I am pretty sure 5.10 is not enough.

If you have knowledge about how to install Koha on OpenSuse it would be great to update the wiki, the existing page is from 2010. We have people asking on #koha or the mailing list sometimes.

 

Cheers,

Jonathan

 

On Mon, 16 Apr 2018 at 22:41 David Cook <dcook at prosentient.com.au <mailto:dcook at prosentient.com.au> > wrote:

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 <tel:02%2092%2012%2008%2099> 

Direct: 02 8005 0595 <tel:02%2080%2005%2005%2095> 

 

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