From owner-freebsd-arch Thu Dec 6 14:51:21 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mail.tgd.net (pop3-ssl.tgd.net [209.81.25.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C1A3D37B41A; Thu, 6 Dec 2001 14:51:17 -0800 (PST) Received: by mail.tgd.net (Postfix, from userid 1001) id 35B4820F13; Thu, 6 Dec 2001 14:49:05 -0800 (PST) Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 14:49:05 -0800 From: Sean Chittenden To: arch@FreeBSD.org Cc: tobez@FreeBSD.org Subject: Perl 5.6.1 in the base.... Message-ID: <20011206144905.B73442@ninja1.internal> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline X-PGP-Key: 0x1EDDFAAD X-PGP-Fingerprint: C665 A17F 9A56 286C 5CFB 1DEA 9F4F 5CEF 1EDD FAAD X-Web-Homepage: http://sean.chittenden.org/ Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Isn't it getting close to the time when we should start thinking about integrating Perl 5.6.1 into the base system? Since 5.0 has been pushed back a year, I'm getting antsy to see the upgrade happen sooner rather than later. Developing on 5.005_03 and then copying scripts to a 5.6 box used to work alright, but I recently have been bitten by the _huge_ difference with mkdir. In perl 5.005_03: mkdir FILENAME,MODE In perl 5.6.1: mkdir FILENAME,MASK mkdir FILENAME Writting a wrapper around this is ugly and shouldn't be necessary. Perl 5.6 came out two years ago. Granted it was an abomination of in terms of backwards compatability, I think that most of the free world has swallowed their gripes and has moved on. Can we? I think we're hard pressed to convince anyone that we're helping out by hanging onto 5.005_03 in the base. At this point, I think it'd be reasonable to make the existing perl install a port and then make perl 5.6 apart of the base. Right now I can't install Xerxes-P because it requires the Unicode support found in Perl 5.6. That's a pretty big show stopper and the #1 reason why I still have some Solaris boxen (read: non-FreeBSD) sitting around (can upgrade/thrash the local install of Perl all I want and it doesn't hurt when it comes time to upgrade). Can someone take this issue up on either -core or even here? I personally would be an advocate of having _both_ versions of perl become packages/ports and then at sys-install time you're forced to choose one of the two versions (need at least one version of perl installed). 4.5 seems like a good time to get 5.6 out there, IMHO. -sc -- Sean Chittenden To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message