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Postings from August 2020
On Thu, 2020-08-06 at 11:39 -0500, Craig A. Berry wrote: > 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. I don't understand why supporting a stable Perl 5 and releasing a slightly more fast-moving Perl 7 are mutually exclusive. I would assume Perl 5 going into a maintenance mode long term support phase give users the option of adopting Perl 7 on their own timeframe when they are ready to do so. I would also assume that users sticking with Perl 5 don't want disruptive changes in Perl 5. You're saying they'll have no notice with the current plan...and that switching the behaviors in a minor version release will be less of a hassle to users than doing so across a major version release. The approach you favor is definitely more consistent with the current Perl 5 release practices. Whether the current release practices are helping the long term outlook for the Perl language seems debatable. To me, the reasonably broad support for doing something different (ignoring disagreements over what form that "something" should take) suggests that there are a lot of people who feel like the long term future of the Perl language is in doubt. If you don't agree with that sentiment, then indeed the status quo is working very well and there's no good reason to change it. If you do agree with that sentiment, then is a five year transition plan to Perl 7 honestly going to improve things? J.D.Thread Previous | Thread Next