on removing encoding.pm

Porter,

According to the documentation of encoding.pm:
This module has been deprecated since perl v5.18. See "DESCRIPTION" and "BUGS".

I invite you to read the documentation, if you like, but:  It's a big complicated library that has many sharp edges, and generally isn't needed because "everybody" has a UTF-8 editor nowadays and we have "use utf8".

When used in an even somewhat recent perl, encoding.pm either dies or emits a deprecation warning.  But we have been getting good at actually giving deprecations teeth by removing them.  I think we should do that with encoding.pm, especially as we have discussed adding a new library to do this job in a much, much simpler fashion.  (source::encoding)

I don't think we should take over encoding.pm, because it has a long legacy of a weird interface that I don't want us to have to think about.  But I think that "use encoding" should be unreservedly fatal in the future.

I think this means:
 * making encoding.pm die on load on new perls (I suggested "no v5.38" but got funny looks on IRC ;) )
 * asking Dan Kogai to consider splitting it into its own distribution; this is not vital
 * updating our test suite, which uses encoding.pm a surprising number of times, to not use it
And then there are at least two questions:
 1. Is this a bad idea?
 2. If not, shall we target 5.36.0 for "fatal to use", even if only on activation, not load?
-- 
rjbs

• on removing encoding.pm by Ricardo Signes
• Re: on removing encoding.pm by Darren Duncan
• Re: on removing encoding.pm by Ricardo Signes