Subject: RE: [PATCH v2 11/12] Require Perl 5.26.0

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2024 21:15:02 -0400

On October 22, 2024 8:46 PM, brian m. carlson wrote:
>Our platform support policy states that we require "versions of
dependencies which
>are generally accepted as stable and supportable, e.g., in line with the
version used
>by other long-term-support distributions".  Of Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, and
SLES, the
>four most common distributions that provide LTS versions, the version with
>mainstream long-term security support with the oldest Perl is 5.26.0 in
SLES 15.6.
>
>This is a major upgrade, since Perl 5.8.1, according to the Perl
documentation, was
>released in September of 2003.  It brings a lot of new features that we can
choose
>to use, such as s///r to return the modified string, the postderef
functionality, and
>subroutine signatures, although the latter was still considered
experimental until
>5.36.
>
>This change was made with the following one-liner, which intentionally
excludes
>modifying the vendored modules we include to avoid conflicts:
>
>    git grep -l 'use 5.008001' | grep -v 'LoadCPAN/' | xargs perl -pi -e
's/use
>5.008001/require v5.26/'
>
>Use require instead of use to avoid changing the behavior as the latter
enables
>features and the former does not.
>
>Signed-off-by: brian m. carlson <[email-masked]>

Please be aware that the most recent version of Perl available on NonStop is
currently
5.26.3. On the ia64 variant, we will not see a newer version *ever*. The x86
platform
Supports 5.30.3 and may evolve. By the end of 2025, the ia64 platform goes
away, so
as long as we can keep 5.26.x as a minimum, that would be acceptable.

Thanks,
Randall