Re: How my BBC Sounds Plugin briefly broke LMS. A cautionary tale!

On Tue, 27 Apr 2021 20:13:54 +0000, philippe_44 wrote:

> I agree that using
> the stock Perl woudl often be better but at the same time, there is no
> army of testers for LMS that can verify every permutation and
> combination of Perl version and OS, so we are really on thin air here.

Yes. Partly.

Every change that is made to LMS can potentially cause breakage on some
weird combination of hardware and software but that doesn't withhold us
from continuing active development.

But let's get real. The downloads on the official site are for
Debian/Ubuntu, Windows and MacOS. There are kits for RPM based systems and
a source tar. Users that go the way of the source tar may be expected to
know what they are doing. The other users may expect an out of the box
functional install.

However, most importantly, users should NOT expect to run a bleeding edge
LMS on an ancient/obsolete platform.

Officially (supported) Debian systems are Stretch and Buster. Stretch comes
with perl 5.24 and Buster comes with 5.28. So it is reasonable to drop
everything older than 5.24. 

All perl modules currently privately included in LMS should be examined and
replaced by current CPAN versions if necessary, but preferrably use the
distro packages instead. (See my other mail.)

Assume LMS 10 would be a breaking new version. If the current 8.x do not
automatically update I do not foresee big problems.

-- Johan