Re: Should we support Perl 5.6?

Eric Wong wrote:

Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Hi,

I just had a failure when pulling, because since a few days (to be exact, 
since commit 1cb30387, git-fmt-merge-msg uses a syntax which is not 
understood by Perl 5.6.

It is this:

open $fh, '-|', 'git-symbolic-ref', 'HEAD' or die "$!";

This is just 5.8 shorthand for the following (which is 5.6-compatible,
and probably for earlier versions, too):

	my $pid = open my $fh, '-|';
	defined $pid or die "Unable to fork: $!\n";
	if ($pid == 0) {
		exec 'git-symbolic-ref', 'HEAD' or die "$!";
	}
	<continue with original code here>

All of the Perl code I've written uses this method.

quoted

I know that there was already some discussion on this list, but I don't 
remember if we decided on leaving 5.6 behind or not.

Somebody remembers?

IIRC, there was no clear decision.

I think we agreed not to bother at all with Perl 5.4 and earlier, and 
not to bend over backwards to support 5.6. This seems like a simple fix 
though, so I'm sure Junio will accept a patch.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
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