Re: Oldest supported Perl version

On Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:59:14 -0700 (PDT), Jakub Narebski
[off-list ref] wrote:

Jay Soffian [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

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

quoted

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).

quoted

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.

Errr... no.  For gitweb we require good Unicode support, which means
Perl 5.8.x (IIRC 5.8.1).  For all other: commands (and helpers)

Unicode? 5.8.4 or up. Most desirable 5.8.5
5.8.1 is the worst distribution ever.

ask purl on irc :
 <Tux> purl, perl-5.8.1?
<purl> i guess perl-5.8.1 is made from blood, sweat, tears, coffee and single malt

written in Perl like git-svn, fragments of Perl in test suite (because
of incompatibility and corner cases of shell scripting) - with possible
exception of testing gitweb, and Git.pm (which some commands in Perl
use) I think it is reasonable to expect 5.6.0 at least.

5.6.1 or 5.8.5

quoted

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. :-)

-- 
H.Merijn Brand  http://tux.nl      Perl Monger  http://amsterdam.pm.org/
using & porting perl 5.6.2, 5.8.x, 5.10.x, 5.11.x on HP-UX 10.20, 11.00,
11.11, 11.23, and 11.31, OpenSuSE 10.3, 11.0, and 11.1, AIX 5.2 and 5.3.
http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/           http://www.test-smoke.org/
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