Support for 5.005_03 [Was: about converters/p5-MIME-Base64 on perl 5.00503]

[Anton Berezin]

On Fri, Jan 06, 2006 at 02:46:33PM +0800, Yen-Ming Lee wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 02:11:00PM +0100, Erwin Lansing wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 08:38:49PM +0800, Yen-Ming Lee wrote:
> > > 
> > > I tried your suggestion about devel/p5-XSLoader, and it works.
> > 
> > Thanks for looking into this. I wasn't too happy to remove support for
> > 5.005_03 from this port, but couldn't find an easy way around it.
> > > 
> > > However, I agree that we should review our supporting policy for old perl.
> > > 
> > I personally don't care much about 5.005_03 anymore. There's just too
> > much that doesn't work with it anymore and it's easy for people to
> > install perl from ports, also on 4.x. I think people really should
> > consider moving to 5.8.7. Even 5.6.x is quite old now, 5.0x goes back to
> > the stone age. Keeping support for the rest of the 4.x lifetime will be
> > too big a PITA.
> > 
> > If we can agree on this (or something else), it may be a good idea to
> > publish this somewhere so the rest of the world knows this.

> If we can (or wanna see if we can) stop supporting perl 5.005_03, what
> should we do next?

My take would be:

1. Mention it in the docs (somewhere).
2. Add a pre-everything conditional on USE_PERL5 and PERL_LEVEL < 500600
   to bsd.port.mk that bitches along the lines "this is not guaranteed
   to work and is unsupported, please upgrade".
3. Stop trying to ensure that ports work with 5.005_03.
4. DEPRECATE things like databases/p5-DBI-137.
5. Go party.

\Anton.
-- 
An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions.
-- Robert A. Humphrey