One of the problems here is that I'm a bit leery of using the system perl
at all for private installations. I stopped doing that years ago as I was
bitten by problems with some bits of the perl coming from rpms and others
from my installs. I now use perlbrew exclusively and my life has much less
pain in it. The decision on what perl PDL should support shouldn't really
be driven by long term maintenance schedules of Linux distributions --
those guys won't be back porting PDL to their distribution anyhow. It's
many years since 5.8.x came out and there are many features in 5.10 and
5.12 that are really useful. One of perl's problems recently has been that
most people haven't even noticed 5.10 and above and think perl is a dead
language. I was also intrigued by the recent discussion on Mavericks and
PDL. I wouldn't dream of using /usr/bin/perl on my Mac.
Note that I can be ignored on all this. I carry no weight.
--
Tim Jenness
On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 1:00 PM, Craig DeForest
<***@boulder.swri.edu>wrote:
> It would be nice if we could use the now-ancient // operator, introduced
> in 5.10.
>
>
> On Nov 21, 2013, at 12:14 PM, Judd Taylor <***@orbitalsystems.com>
> wrote:
>
> One of the reasons (well, the only reason, really), that I need 5.8.8 is
> because that's what RHEL5 is running, and RHEL 5 is supposed to be
> supported for quite a while. Maybe the policy should be that we should
> support Perls as old as are in current support for major distributions,
> especially the ones that are supposed to remain stable for a given
> timespan, like 5 years in the case of RHEL 5.
>
> What specifically are you planning on introducing into the code that will
> break older perls than 5.10?
>
> -Judd
>
> ____________________________
> Judd Taylor
> Software Engineer
>
> Orbital Systems, Ltd.
> 3807 Carbon Rd.
> Irving, TX 75038-3415
>
> (972) 915-3669 x127
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Craig DeForest [***@boulder.swri.edu]
> *Sent:* Thursday, November 21, 2013 9:57 AM
> *To:* David Mertens
> *Cc:* Chris Marshall; ***@jach.hawaii.edu; pdl-porters
> *Subject:* Re: [Pdl-porters] [Perldl] update PDL perl version to 5.10.x
>
> I don't have a strong reason to push for 5.12 over 5.10. But I'm with
> you, David, on the need for a policy. "Last five stable versions" seems
> reasonable.
>
>
> On Nov 21, 2013, at 7:20 AM, David Mertens <***@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> That said, I think it might be nice to provide a clear dependency policy.
> For example, we could promise to support all default Perls on the latest
> versions of Cygwin, Strawberry, Active Perl, Mac OSX, Debian stable,
> Centos, and Fedora. Note that some of those---namely Centos and Debian
> stable---may be a bit conservative and we could instead provide
> instructions or even install scripts that would install perlbrew and a
> newer version of Perl.
>
> Or, we could just promise to work on the *five* latest stable versions of
> Perl (which, at the moment, would be 5.18, 5.16, 5.14, 5.12, and 5.10), and
> therefore (try to) nudge Cygwin to move along. If we keep working with the
> oldest Perl, then the distributors have no need to move forward, right?
>
> David
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 9:10 AM, David Mertens <***@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I don't see a need to move to 5.12. I think I'll eventually advocate for
>> that because of the lexical keyword API, but I don't have anything for that
>> yet and I think that Zefram typically writes CPAN modules which provide the
>> same C interfaces for older Perls.
>>
>> The biggest Perl feature I would like to see is user-level pragmatic
>> modules <http://perldoc.perl.org/perlpragma.html>, which come with 5.10.
>> And actually, what I really want is warmings from a module<http://perldoc.perl.org/perllexwarn.html#Reporting-Warnings-from-a-Module>.
>> AFAICT, that's been available since 5.6, so I suppose I/we could have
>> started on that a long time ago. Heh.
>>
>> David
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 7:11 PM, Chris Marshall <***@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Without detailed information on who would be affected
>>> by a change in the required/supported version of perl,
>>> I would prefer to minimize disruption for PDL users.
>>> For example, I do know that the older cygwin releases
>>> used perl 5.10.x and a jump to 5.12 could make them
>>> not able to use PDL.
>>>
>>> That said, if there is a specific need that could be
>>> addressed by jumping to 5.12.x, that could justify
>>> the change. Anything in mind---I haven't seen anything
>>> myself.
>>>
>>> All is not bad, if we go to 5.10 support, we can finally
>>> use 'say' ... :-)
>>>
>>> --Chris
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 9:19 AM, Craig DeForest
>>> <***@boulder.swri.edu> wrote:
>>> > Why not bump to 5.12?
>>> >
>>> > (mobile)
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > On Nov 20, 2013, at 4:42 AM, Chris Marshall <***@gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>> >
>>> >> I propose moving to perl 5.10.x as the officially
>>> >> supported perl version for general PDL development,
>>> >> effective immediately.
>>> >>
>>> >> I don't expect this to affect the legacy PDL users
>>> >> as they often are using PDL versions back as far
>>> >> as 2.4.3.
>>> >>
>>> >> Comment, discussion, votes?
>>> >> Chris
>>> >>
>>> >> _______________________________________________
>>> >> PDL-porters mailing list
>>> >> PDL-***@jach.hawaii.edu
>>> >> http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/pdl-porters
>>> >>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Perldl mailing list
>>> ***@jach.hawaii.edu
>>> http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
>> Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
>> by definition, not smart enough to debug it." -- Brian Kernighan
>>
>
>
>
> --
> "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
> Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
> by definition, not smart enough to debug it." -- Brian Kernighan
>
>
>
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>
>