[ On Monday, January 10, 2005 at 15:19:47 (-0500), Todd Vierling wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: And speaking of PKGREVISION: Perl version bumping
>
> On Mon, 10 Jan 2005, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > 
> > I think the right thing to do would be to do it in the same way that
> > lang/ruby* is now set up to do (which is how all these things should
> > have been done in the first place of course).
> 
> That's unrelated.  I'm talking within-major-version backwards compatibility
> here (5.8.5 to 5.8.6, for example, where there is usually not a libperl ABI
> change), not compatibility from 5.6 to 5.8.

There will always eventually be a new major version to consider and
unless some perl hacker really wants to make sure _all_ pkgsrc perl-using
packages _always_ work with the preferred pkgsrc version of perl then the
same situation will eventually occur again regardless.

Building this capability into the infrastructure for handling perl now,
just as it's done with ruby, and should be done with python etc. too,
would ensure that it becomes second nature and works well for that
inevitability.  It also avoids the worries about whether or not any
given version maintains ABI compatabilty or not.

The fact that there are both language compatability and loadable module
ABI compatability issue to worry about only seems to make it more
important.

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

H:+1 416 218-0098  W:+1 416 489-5852 x122  VE3TCP  RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>          Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>