On Jan 21, 2022, at 19:43, Gabriel Rosenkoetter wrote: > I'm… also not sure it's even actually a good idea, since, in my experience, > Perl is much more flexible about newer versions of `perl` functioning with > "out-dated" versions of libraries *and* vice versa than, say, PHP is. (I > think maybe Python plays better with date-of-release mismatches?)
I agree that it does seem that perl versions are typically more backward-compatible than some other software. Perl is very mature software that probably doesn't need to introduce many breaking changes at this point (though there was at least one notable exception in recent memory where "." was removed from the default inc path which broke a zillion modules which then had to be patched). For this reason, and because of the complexity that comes with having multiple perl versions, it has often been suggested that MacPorts should abandon offering multiple perl versions and should just offer one -- the latest. Transitioning MacPorts to just one perl would be a large undertaking, so we should probably be sure that we want to do that before anyone puts in the effort to do it. We did, after all, used to have just one perl and a long time ago switched to offering multiple perls, because at the time we thought that was a good thing to do.
