Re: about requiring Perl 5.6 in Automake 1.9

[Russ Allbery]

Akim Demaille <address@hidden> writes:

> Actually, why not jumping to something really more recent.  Some people
> will have to upgrade their Perl installation, so they probably won't
> install 5.6 anyway.

Bad idea... Perl 5.6 is the version that ships standard right now with
many stable distributions and is far and away the most widely deployed
version at present.  5.8 is very new as Perl revisions go and not widely
deployed yet.

Due to the amount of work required to upgrade Perl and track down and
rebuild modules, not to mention the number of people who just use the
version that comes with their operating system, it frequently takes up to
five years for a new major version of Perl to reach widespread deployment.

I think going to 5.6 for the next major version of Automake is fine, but
going to 5.8 would be premature.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>