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Postings from August 2020
On Thu, Aug 6, 2020 at 1:50 AM Tomasz Konojacki <me@xenu.pl> wrote: > It's a false dichotomy that all users want either legacy > maintenance-mode Perl that never changes or total breakage without any > warning. As I said in my previous post, there's an obvious third way. +1. I believe you have raised this point before. Branislav mentioned "feature lifecycles" more than once. I and others have raised similar points. It is a very common and, as you say, obvious way of doing things that almost every open source project of any size practices in some form. Yet the most obvious way to balance backward compatibility and forward movement seems not to have been considered, is not in the list of "perceived positions" collated by the steering committee,[1] and was perhaps allowed but not explicitly mentioned in Ricardo's post that opened this thread. Changing what features are enabled by default in no way requires one big bet-the-farm incompatible change on short notice. Consider an alternate universe in which v5.32 was released along with an announcement that in v5.36, "use v5.12" or equivalent would be on by default and in v5.40 would become mandatory. Paul Evans has recently reminded us of just how much that does.[2] People would have five years to get ready for the end of support of 5.38.x, including getting CPAN and the toolchain into a form where a module version can specify the minimum and maximum Perl versions it supports. Meanwhile, v5.34 could announce a new feature bundle to be enabled in v5.38 and mandatory in v5.42. Lather, rinse, repeat. And possibly rename 5.40.0 to 7.0.0 and use a new major version whenever a new feature bundle becomes mandatory. Maybe five years is too little (though in the example I gave, it starts with a feature bundle that has already been available for 10 years). The principles of least surprise and fair warning are more important than any particular feature lifetime. Six months is definitely too little and forever is plausibly too long. Why those were considered the only alternatives continues to mystify me. [1] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/wiki/Perceived-Positions-on-Perl-7 [2] https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=perl.perl5.porters/fpx9yNkKgak/7HFpSBk5AgAJThread Previous | Thread Next