On Wed, 8 Jun 2005, John Delacour wrote: > Why does not Apple update Perl through sofware update?
As I understand it, the rationale is that a lot of things depend on the release of Perl that shipped with the system -- installers, startup scripts, periodic daemons, etc. If Perl were to be upgraded, then all the things that depend on it would need additional rounds of QA testing with each release, but they don't have the resources to support this. Let's say, as a plausible example, that the iTunes installer uses Perl for initial setup. As it is now, any iTunes update on Panther needs to be tested with Perl 5.8.1, and any update on Tiger needs to be tested against 5.8.6; all other releases can be ignored. If Apple were to release revisions to Perl as they come out, then they'd have to start testing each Panther version against all Perls 5.8.>1, and all Tiger versions would have to be tested aginst 5.8.>6. (And that's not even mentioning Jaguar, which might [?] still get iTunes updates, so that would be all Perls from 5.6.1 and up.) Clearly, things start multiplying fast. And every combination in the matrix of release versions would have to be tested, as different people will have different system update levels, some will have skipped some packages, etc. So, while I do wish that they made it simpler to put a newer version of Perl somewhere like /usr/local, I can sympathize with the rationale for not tampering with the version that ships as standard with each major iteration of the system. -- Chris Devers
