Re: about requiring Perl 5.6 in Automake 1.9

[Guido Draheim]

Alexandre Duret-Lutz wrote:
> Right now, automake officially requires at least Perl 5.005.
>
> Perl 5.005_03 will be 5 years old next month, and supporting it
> is becoming painful.
> [....]
> How many people would be annoyed by this?  Is there any reason
> why this would be a very bad idea?
>
> I know some people are still using 5.005_03.  We'd have never
> noticed the aforementioned breakages otherwise.  However I do
> not know why they do.  Is there any reason why upgrading to
> newer Perl versions would be undesirable?

I will check a few production systems in the engineering lab next
week. It is about a year that I was last checking for the tool
versions. Perl 5/03 was present back then on a few solaris systems
and all the hpux systems.

The problem is two faced however, these productions systems tend
to be updated very conservative with automake versions themselves
lagging years in behind. Generally the admins are approached on
request and then automake 1.x requiring a 5.6 perl would simply
come out as a need to just replace the perl itself on the system
at that very point.

Since older series is supported, I do not think it is a problem,
just in case one can be conservative and only go as far as 1.8
in the upgrade cycle possibly delaying upgrade to 1.9 for a
few, err, years. All I can say is a `me too`, it is actually
more about the opensource programmers who get annoyed, and we
tend to think _them_ having bad ideas and causing breakage...

Anyway, you see that an upgrade need would come out as that
maybe 1.9 has a higher acceptance barrier - just see how
autoconf 2.13 is still being in use years after its release.
That can be expected always to be the case when making upgrade
a problem space of its own.

So, personally I would ask to _not_ update the _minimal_
requirements, just the _recommended_ runtime environment.
I had seen partial effects with adding a startup routine to
some packages that checks the runtime environment and puts
warning messages ("too old, expect problems") to the user
error log _and_ system log (the latter is even more important).
Especially, I started out with adding such messages as a
mere future warning to the precursor that would only go to
the user log ("future warning, please upgrade perl"). You
could add an -oldperl flag to automake_options that would
suppress the future warning in 1.8 *tools.

have fun, guido