Re: Digest::MD5 v2.51 breaks backward compatibility with Perl 5.6.0 through 5.8.0.

On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 04:25:23PM -0700, David Oswald wrote:

> The module Digest::MD5 was added to the Perl core distribution in Perl
> 5.8.0.  That means that users committed to pre-5.8.0 versions of Perl
> will have to install Digest::MD5 if they need it.  However, as of
> version 2.51, Digest::MD5 is no longer backward compatible with Perls
> earlier than 5.8.1.  This isn't such a big deal for a user of 5.8.0,
> since it came with an older version of Digest::MD5.  But users of Perl
> versions earlier than 5.8.0 are forced to explicitly install an old
> Digest::MD5 version (2.40 or earlier).
> 
> The various CPAN installers (cpan, cpanm, cpanp) default to pulling in
> the most recent version of any module, and in the case of Digest::MD5,
> this means that the default behavior is to pull in a version that
> won't build on Perl's earlier than 5.8.1.

> In the specific case of my user, the user was trying to install
> Math::Prime::FastSieve, which has an Inline::CPP dependency, which has
> an Inline dependency, which has a Digest::MD5 dependency.  The user
> was trying to install on Perl 5.6.1.
> 
> I guess my question is "What has to happen next?"  :)

This is a general problem, to which the general solution is probably the
excellent cpxxxan: http://cpxxxan.barnyard.co.uk/

In this particular case, I suppose http://cp5.6.2an.barnyard.co.uk/ is
the instance you would need.  And looking in the index at
http://cp5.6.2an.barnyard.co.uk/modules/02packages.details.txt you can
see that the version of Digest::MD5 is indeed 2.40.

-- 
Paul Johnson - [email protected]
http://www.pjcj.net