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[perl #119493] perl5.18.0-broken -- breaks most existing programs w/warnings

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From:
Linda Walsh via RT
Date:
August 29, 2013 21:42
Subject:
[perl #119493] perl5.18.0-broken -- breaks most existing programs w/warnings
Message ID:
rt-3.6.HEAD-1873-1377812532-339.119493-15-0@perl.org
On Thu Aug 29 03:30:40 2013, davem wrote:
> 
> Linda, you have repeated this misapprehension several times. p5p is an
> open forum where matters of significant difference of opinion are often
> discussed. Banning individuals from the list is an *extremely* rare
> occurrence. In my 12+ years on the list I can only recall a single
> individual being banned, that one being you. You may wish to reflect
upon that fact for a bit.
----
Yet the one individual you banned is also the one who would have flagged
this as a serious problem before perl went out.

That one individual came up with 2 actions to mitigate the problem and
no one here sees any issue with my suggest that they have bothered to
mention.  That makes me believe the group didn't come up with those options.

1) I asked why it was turned on by default for old programs.  When a new
feature is added, isn't it that people must usually "opt-in", by, at
least, saying "use <5.latest>"?  If it was new for 5.18, then it should
have only activated if I asked it to "use 5.18".

2) The compiler breaks existing programs and you don't care.  How you
can consider breakage on a wide scale not to be a problem is beyond me.
 It's almost malicious intent. 

Yet did you give any way  for someone to turn off that error in their
environment or on their system?  The solution is notably the worst kind
in that it requires all programs be modified, *immediately*,  before
5.18 is adopted -- and even then, people may resist the upgrade due to
fears about code they use or are missing in their review.

Since I've been using perl in 1990, I've never encountered this level of
source incompatibility out of any version.
5
Going from 4.x->5.0 was no where near as problematic as 5.16->18.  This
isn't about a design decision that *was* made -- its about it needing to
be fixed in 5.18.1 so it won't be a barrier to installation when people
can become aware of these issues by explicitly "use 5.18" or above. That
can give those who want to test against new features in 5.18 a heads-up
that the other things exist without affecting previously running
programs (email routing and backups came to a halt as soon as I tried
installing 5.18).  Broken infrastructure is a
consequence of perl breaking key scripts.  Without a site and/or
computer wide way of disabling the new perl SPAMS the user with
massive repetition of the same errors in out of every module.  

It doesn't seem to be the case that you can turn the warnings on a
per-file basis.  Having 10-15 structures in one program  file, 
They are just structures...  I have to put in changes in each 
"package" to turn off those errors.  How could this be considered
anything but extremely intrusive.  

Yet p5p seems to revel in the breakage they cause, because their cause
is just (or so they all agree).

This is still a bug despite your rejecting the messenger (again).


 

---
via perlbug:  queue: perl5 status: rejected
https://rt.perl.org:443/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=119493

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