Mailing List Archive

perl-5.10 inclusion
Hello list,

I already talked about this topic yesterday in #-dev.
perl-5.10 is out since end of 2007 [1] and we still don't have it in our main
portage-tree but rather have it kinda rotting in the perl-experimental
overlay.
I know that the perl team is badly understaffed with only one active dev who
is not even on the member list (is that right, tove?) but there has to be
done something. We cannot stick with perl-5.8 forever.
So my suggestion is to ask for help here. Anybody willing to help please grab
the perl-experimental overlay, install {lib,}perl-5.10 and start to use it on
a regular basis. If you don't mind, try to install as much perl-packages as
possible and report back any failures to our bugzilla.
I already started on that and "infected" two of my systems with perl-5.10. My
VM (which I originally only set up for testing of kde-4) is currently running
a 'USE="perl" emerge -e @world' and till now 320 out of 550 packages
installed without any problems on that machine.
Next step will be to go though perl-core and dev-perl categories and install
every package being in there.
My intention is to get a picture about how many packages are broken with
perl-5.10. The fixing of those packages is something I unfortunately cannot
do (I'm a complete perl-noob) but maybe this is a good start getting
perl-5.10 finally into portage.
By the way, as soon as I find the first packages being broken with perl-5.10 I
will open a tracker bug in bugzilla. So watch out for it if you stumble about
failing packages with perl-5.10 yourself.

Lars Wendler (Polynomial-C)
Gentoo Staffer and bug-wrangler

[1] according to the perl website version 5.10 is more than one year and seven
months old: http://www.cpan.org/src/README.html
Re: perl-5.10 inclusion [ In reply to ]
* Lars Wendler <polynomial-c@gentoo.org>:
> perl-5.10 is out since end of 2007 [1] and we still don't have it in our main

This is the problem. To add 5.10.0 now you have to review 1.5 years of
patches.

http://git.debian.org/?p=perl/perl.git;a=heads
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/devel/perl/
...

I am sure there is at least one security related patch missing in the
perl-experimental package.

OTOH: 5.10.1 is expected soon. A first release candidate was scheduled
for this weekend.
Well, once the "...plan was to have 5.10.1 out by the end of the year...."
That was last year and the point where i stopped spending time
on packaging 5.10.0. Looking back after 9 month, this was probably not
the best decision.


I don't expect to find many problems within other packages.

What needs to be done:
- Find maintainers.
- Fix our patchset:
http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/perl5-packaging.git;a=summary
- Fix perl-cleaner and test the upgrade path:
http://github.com/tove/perl-cleaner/tree