Re: Dropping support for older perl

On 09/08/17 15:38, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

RHEL/CentOS 5.x has perl 5.8.8, but it also has curl 7.15.5[1] which is
obseleted by these curl patches. Maybe we'd want to be more conservative
with perl for whatever reason, but I'd like to at least bump our
requirenment of 5.8.0 to 5.8.8. Those releases are 4 years apart, and a
lot of bugs were fixed[2], and some constructs / modules have newer APIs
we could use.

But if we do the thing corresponding to these curl patches we should
bump the dependency to 5.10.1, that was released in August 2009 (and the
curl version JK is bumping us to in March 2009), and 5.10.1 is shipped
with RHEL/CentOS 6.

I agree with your thoughts.
Though I'm a bit biased since I only really care about RHEL/CentOS in 
the context of being able to use vendor provided versions of curl and perl.

The bump to 5.10.1 may be a bad idea, I know AIX/HPUX/Solaris and some
others have historically been more conservative about upgrading perl
than stuff like libcurl since it's in the base system.

AFAIK it used to be common to build updated versions at least on Solaris.
I provide perl 5.16.x and a recent curl for Solaris 2.6-9 as part of 
tgcware(1) and Solaris 10/11 users can use OpenCSW which seems to have 
5.10.1 available.

-tgc

1) https://jupiterrise.com/tgcware/