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Re: Perl 5.10.1

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From:
David E. Wheeler
Date:
June 24, 2009 09:43
Subject:
Re: Perl 5.10.1
Message ID:
BE0E842F-73F3-47FD-8FE1-FFA103B331EE@kineticode.com
On Jun 24, 2009, at 7:20 AM, Nicholas Clark wrote:

> To make this fly, please help work on figuring out and implementing  
> automatic
> smoking of a configurable subset of branches. The smoking doesn't  
> need to be
> for all configuration permutations, as most blead smokers currently  
> do.

That's a reasonable thing to do, assuming that changes to maintenance  
branches are inherently conservative (that is, bug fixes and  
documentation fixes only).

> For example, I remember the pain of trying to get Storable to pass on
> all platforms, when it was added to core. That's a module that was  
> already
> on CPAN, and (notionally) widely tested, yet had issues with various
> exacting platforms. The way I'd see it being done today, under your  
> model,
> would be in a branch, which would become merged to core once it was  
> stable.
> Hence without preliminary smoke testing of branches, we would not  
> have had
> a stable merge.

This is also a good argument for paring the number of core modules way  
down so that you have much less of a maintenance nightmare for core  
Perl itself.

> Again, we had portability issues more recently, when writing shell  
> scripts
> to grab the git state and feed it into the right places to show up  
> in -v
> and -V output. [The eventual solution to which was "use perl" :-)]

I hear it's a great little language for that sort of thing. ;-)

Best,

David

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