[Koha-devel] Koha now requires Perl 5.20

Wed Apr 18 03:46:10 CEST 2018

I think whatever version of Perl that is in Debian would make sense for the community to support.

However, I think there is a difference between supporting and requiring. Koha shouldn’t require the supported version, imho. If people – like us – want to use an unsupported version, the onus should be on them. There could be a warning on the About page saying that they’re using an unsupported version of Perl. I think that would make sense. 

That said, there may come a time when there is a Perl language feature that is used in Koha which is only available in a new version of Perl. Ideally, it would be nice for Koha to stay as backwards compatible as possible, but that might not always be possible. 

If we do move completely to a Plack/Mojolicious environment, that opens up possibilities with virtual environments too where we wouldn’t even have to use the system Perl anymore. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about the versions in OS distributions. We could just specify what version is needed for Koha and package that with it. 

That said, I imagine there will be people using CGI for a long time in multi-tenant environments still. 

Sorry I guess that’s not much of an answer. I’d say… officially support what is in Debian but let people use unsupported versions. I mean… maybe we should require the Debian version. Folk like me can always just customize the source… 

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 9:17 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

And after the revert we are going to talk about the version to support:
5.10 has been release on 2007 and end of life since 2009
"Please note that branches earlier than 5.20 are no longer supported, though fixes for urgent issues, for example severe security problems, may still be issued."

Which version would seem acceptable to you?

To me 5.20 sounds way too old already...

On Tue, 17 Apr 2018 at 07:57 Jonathan Druart <jonathan.druart at bugs.koha-community.org <mailto:jonathan.druart at bugs.koha-community.org> > wrote:

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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