Re: Let's bump the minimum Perl version to 5.8

["Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 13:47, Randal L. Schwartz <merlyn@stonehenge.com> wrote:
>>>>>> "Ævar" == Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> writes:
>
> Ævar> Since we're not getting patches for common things that have been
> Ævar> broken on 5.6 for years and bumping the requirenment to an 8 year old
> Ævar> perl (5.8) instead of a 10 year old one (5.6) would make things much
> Ævar> easier, including:
>
> Ævar>  * Fixing the perl/ Makefile mess
>
> Ævar>  * Being able to use 5.8 features
>
> Ævar>  * Being able to honestly support the 5.8 release, 5.6 doesn't even
> Ævar>    compile on modern systems without undocumented monkeypatches, and
> Ævar>    few people use it so we don't get fixes for it.
>
> Ævar> I'd like to propose dropping 5.6 support, and move to say 5.008. I can
> Ævar> do the work required to add appropriate docs / use statements and
> Ævar> fixes to bugs that we can't fix on 5.6.
>
> As the token resident Perl expert, I'd be completely fine with that.
> Sane choice.
>
> It might be useful to document that by adding:
>
>  require 5.008;

Right, except that should be `use 5.008`. Since you don't want to run
anything else within an implicit or explicit BEGIN block before perl
fails on that. E.g. `require 5.008; use Digest::MD5;` would just spew
an error about Digest::MD5.

The only reason you'd want `require $version' is if you care about
5.005, but even then you can do `BEGIN { require 5.008 }`.