Oldest supported Perl version

On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 9:58 PM, Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

Sorry, I should have checked myself.  defined-or "//" is 5.8.1 or later.

Now the real question was if we still support anything older, and if so
what is the bottom version?

I certainly can go with "5.8.1 or later", but I vaguely recall during the
gitweb discussion we said anything without the utf-8 support is unusable
for gitweb, but I think we also said that the rest of the git codebase
should support running with something older (5.6.1, perhaps).

15 minutes of research:

* 2006-06-25 Junio C Hamano: "Tentatively let's say our cut-off point is
  somewhere around 5.6." --
  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/22607

* 2008-05-30 Lea Wiemann: "Gitweb relies on Unicode support (e.g. "use
  Encode") and will continue to be compatible with 5.8 and 5.10 only" --
  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/83339

* 2008-08-13 Lea Wiemann: "This makes Git.pm dependent on Perl 5.6.1. Some
  tests (like t3701-add-interactive.sh) seem to work with pretty much any Perl
  version out there, and requiring File::Spec changes this" --
  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/92260

* 2008-08-15 Marcus Griep: "Git.pm: Make File::Spec and File::Temp requirement
  lazy" -- c14c8ce

* 2008-08-30 Junio C Hamano: "I agree we should say we rely on 5.6 or newer."
  -- http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/94399

* 2008-09-01 Junio C Hamano: "I personally think it is probably Ok to declare
  that we do depend on 5.8" --
  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/94523


So here's my take-away. For the *.perl scripts and gitweb, it's 5.8.0. For the
test suite and Git.pm, all Perl versions are theoretically supported, but for
practical purposes, it may be 5.6.0.

Whatever is decided this time, perhaps it should be burned into the tops of
the *.perl scripts (i.e. "require 5.008;"). It should also be added to
CodingGuidelines. You know, so this conversation doesn't keep recurring. :-)

j.