Re: [RFC/PATCH] perl: bump the required Perl version to 5.10.0 from 5.8.0

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

> This is similar to Jeff King's jk/drop-ancient-curl series in that
> we're dropping perl releases that are rarely tested anymore, however
> unlike those patches git still works on e.g. 5.8.8 (I couldn't build
> anything older).

FWIW I think this is a good change.  If someone is affected and offers
help with keeping git working well with older perl (e.g. setting up CI
for us) then we can keep supporting it, but it seems more likely to me
that there will just not be anyone affected.

And being able to assume a newer baseline perl version seems
beneficial both from a security point of view and from a developer
experience pov.

Some minor nits:

[...]
>  contrib/diff-highlight/DiffHighlight.pm | 2 +-
>  contrib/examples/git-difftool.perl      | 2 +-
>  contrib/mw-to-git/Git/Mediawiki.pm      | 2 +-

I'm less opinionated about these.  They're already using the same perl
baseline as the rest of git, so I suppose it's good to keep them
consistent, but if any of them gives you trouble then I think you can
just ignore it and let the relevant contrib maintainer take care of
it. :)

[...]
> --- a/git-add--interactive.perl
> +++ b/git-add--interactive.perl
> @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
>  #!/usr/bin/perl
>  
> -use 5.008;
> +use v5.10.0;

As brian carlson mentioned, 'use 5.010' would produce a clearer error
message on ancient perl, which could result in happier users on
ancient platforms or clearer bug reports.

That said, I don't have a strong opinion there.

Reviewed-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>