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Postings from April 2000
On Sat, 1 Apr 2000, David Grove wrote:
> Perl 5.6, in the context of a Perl system (which includes more than the core
> modules), is broken, in that it's extension mechanism is not compatible with
> many of those modules, and no backwards compatibility was built in.
Please be specific and precise. 5.6.0 has two different specific
backwards-compatibility mechanisms built in.
One is bincompat5005, which is set by Configure to 'define' by default.
This provides binary compatibility so most old modules continue to run
without being recompiled.
The second is PERL_POLLLUTE, which deals with source compatibiliity issues
(e.g. PL_na), should you decide to rebuild a module. (Note that you
usually don't *have* to rebuild a module -- 5.6.0 will, by default, look
for and use your old 5.005_03 moduiles. With PERL_POLLUTE, you have two
options: You can either enable it on a case-by-case basis for extensions
with perl Makefile.PL POLLUTE=1, or you can build your perl to always
pollute. This is discussed in the INSTALL file. Note too that these
changes were made in October 1998, so the community has had 16 months to
become aware of them and act accordingly. I don't think waiting another
month or so would change things too much.
Some of us worked very hard to try to maintain backwards compatibility. I
personally am disappointed to read that despite all that hard work you
still claim that "no backwards compatibility was built in."
Andy Dougherty doughera@lafayette.edu
Dept. of Physics
Lafayette College, Easton PA 18042
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