On Sunday, January 12, 2003, at 09:33  PM, Kyle Moffett wrote:
On Sunday, Jan 12, 2003, at 20:34 US/Eastern, Carsten Klapp wrote:

Hi All,

Aside from these directory name issues I have a start on some perl 5.8 info files based on a perl 5.8 info file from the submission tracker. The modules I found so far which need to be recompiled simply have a new info file identical to the old one but with a build/depends on the new perl. Take a look in the experimental/carstenklapp cvs dir.
Some modules are 100% perl code, and for the most part they can be built and installed in the 5.6.0 and 5.8.0 directories without changes. (IE only install destination command is changed) For these modules we just copy the files between 5.6.0 and 5.8.0 dirs.
I have a few questions:
* How will this work with dependency tracking? Will those pure-perl modules depend
only on perl >= 5.6.0 instead of perl = 5.6.0 and perl = 5.8.0?
* What happens when 5.8.1 comes out? Will those be multi-version packages be revised
to add files to another version dir? What if the 5.8.1 revision of a module ceases
to support 5.6.0? (not likely, I admit)
* How do I remove the 5.6.0 cruft someday without nuking my 5.8.0 modules?
* What if a future version of a given module switches from pure-perl to XS for speed's
sake? I guess the splitoff mechanism supports this point...

It is my understanding that not all perl modules need to be recompiled for 5.8, only binary XS modules. (I really don't know what XS means and I have no idea how to tell if a module works or not without recompiling unless there is an error using it). Anyway this would mean a lot of the perl mods in fink should still work with the new perl without needing a recompile.
Any module that compiles C or C++ code should be considered XS (There may be one or two that aren't, but those are the minority) Otherwise, unless specified by the module author, it should work on both > versions.

As reported by "perldoc perlhist", there have been 4 binary incompatible Perl releases since July 1998: 5.005 (7/1998), 5.6.0 (3/2000), 5.6.1 (4/2001), and 5.8.0 (7/2002). I think one release per year is not too steep for module maintainers (flame me if this is naive -- I only maintain one package right now!). Especially if we start dropping the old ones, or decide to not support 5.6.1.

Chris



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