Re: podlators 5.00 released

Leon Timmermans <[email protected]> writes:
> On Fri, Nov 25, 2022 at 11:53 PM Russ Allbery <[email protected]> wrote:

>>  - Drop support for Perl 5.8.  The minimum required version is Perl 5.10.

> It turns out that that part of the change made Module::Build
> uninstallable on 5.8, which makes half of CPAN uninstallable on 5.8. I
> resolved this by dropping the Pod::Man dependency (it was only needed
> for utf8-support on 5.8).

I'm sorry to have caused you problems!

> That said, I would really appreciate it if in the future people would
> talk a bit more with their upstreams when incrementing their perl
> dependency; this could easily have been not so easy to work around.

Is there a forum in which this sort of conversation takes place?  I would
be happy to have this discussion; I just don't know where to do it.  Maybe
perl5-porters, which I haven't been subscribed to for some years (although
I send release notifications here) because it used to be super-high
volume, but maybe it's not any more?

Anyway, the reason why I thought this was safe is because Pod::Man is part
of Perl core, so it's always available.  I assume the problem is that
Module::Build is requesting a later version than what comes with Perl in
5.8 (for Unicode support), and CPAN doesn't have the same support that
PyPI has for providing multiple versions and being able to fall back on an
older version if the newer version doesn't meet available constraints
(such as not supporting the current version of Perl)?

I'm trying to be fairly conservative, but I don't really want to support
old versions of Perl in new releases forever, mostly because Perl has
improved!  In this specific case, the // operator makes the code easier to
maintain, but the main motivating reason was that Test::MinimumVersion was
telling me that regex constructs I use were buggy prior to Perl 5.10.  In
the future, I would like to be able to use the package NAMESPACE VERSION
syntax instead of $VERSION and the $foo->@* syntax instead of @{ $foo },
so eventually it would be nice to require Perl 5.024 or later, although I
know that's much too aggressive at the moment.

-- 
#!/usr/bin/perl -- Russ Allbery, Just Another Perl Hacker
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