Rebuild all ports for perl minor version update?

[Thomas Mueller]

from my priginal post:

I see in the $PORTSDIR/UPDATING file that perl has been updated.

perl5.16 has been updated from 5.16.2 to 5.16.3 .

Since this is only (?) a minor-version update, why should it be necessary to upgrade all ports that depend on perl?

portmaster -r perl

In that case, why didn't they go to perl 5.18?

Since so many ports depend on perl, and png too, maybe they should have updated perl and png (to 1.6.x) at the same time, then two massive portmaster or portupgrade runs could have been done together, as one even bigger portmaster or portupgrade run?
 
John Marino responded:

> According to OpenBSD's Marc Espie on a pkgsrc list, a lot of
> established scripts will break on perl 5.18.  Apparently it is not
> highly backwards compatible.

> A large % of the perl packages would cease to build if they just moved
> to 5.18.  A minor upgrade is definitely better.

But then why must all FreeBSD ports that depend on perl be rebuilt for a minor-version upgrade, 5.16.2 to 5.16.3?

Tom