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Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:09:44 +0100
From: Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.org>
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To: Jonathan McKeown <jonathan@hst.org.za>
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Perl-5.10.0 in FBSD-7.0
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Jonathan McKeown wrote:
> On Wednesday 23 January 2008 21:19, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> 
>> Historically, new versions of perl are a recipe for large amounts of
>> pain because of all the old perl code that stops working.
> 
> I haven't used perl 5.10 yet, but looking at the changes (available at 
> <http://search.cpan.org/~rgarcia/perl-5.10.0/pod/perl5100delta.pod>), and in 
> particular the section headed ``incompatible changes'', it looks like a small 
> number of odd corners (for example, chdir FOO - unquoted argument now treated 
> as filehandle not directory name) rather than a wholesale change like perl 
> 5.8, which was binary-incompatible with earlier perls and therefore required 
> any modules using the XS interface to C code to be recompiled.
> 
> Perl 5.10 does introduce a couple of new operators (defined-or, spelt //, and 
> smart-match, spelt ~~), and a number of enhancements which have to be 
> switched on using the ``feature'' pragma - most of these changes have 
> filtered back from the Perl 6 effort.

Time will tell ;-)  A single failure deep in the ports tree is enough to 
ruin the day of thousands of users.

Kris