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Re: disabling smartmatch and when()?

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From:
Leon Timmermans
Date:
June 20, 2022 18:29
Subject:
Re: disabling smartmatch and when()?
Message ID:
CAHhgV8hNe5Z9az4PDo_XAs9d4DAWnsdj6USW26vDgjWoaz5DWw@mail.gmail.com
On Mon, Jun 20, 2022 at 6:58 PM Dave Mitchell <davem@iabyn.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 20, 2022 at 05:54:52PM +0200, Tomasz Konojacki wrote:
> > On Mon, 20 Jun 2022 15:43:44 +0100
> > Dave Mitchell <davem@iabyn.com> wrote:
> >
> > > It's gone through a 9 year deprecation cycle, with a mandatory
> > > experimental warning that you have to explicitly disable.
> >
> > So signatures were deprecated too? "Experimental" doesn't mean
> > deprecated. If we want smartmatch to be deprecated, then we should
> > deprecate it. We should have done that a long time ago, instead of
> > pretending that signatures/try/isa/whatever have the same status as
> > smartmatch.
> >
> > Smartmatch was made "experimental" retroactively and for a large portion
> > of our users the warnings started appearing as late as 10 years after it
> > was introduced!
>
> Smartmatch was introduced in 2007 5.10.0).
> It's behaviour was radically changed in 2009 (5.10.1/5.12.0).
> It started having a mandatory warning in 2013 (5.18.0).
>
> > RHEL6: released in 2010, supported until 2020: perl 5.10 (no warnings)
> > RHEL7: released in 2014, supported until 2024: perl 5.16 (no warnings)
> > RHEL8: released in 2019, supported until 2029: perl 5.26 (warns)
>
> RHEL is hardly a relevant comparison. It is an extremely conservative
> linux server distribution whose software is usually years out of date.
> Virtually no one will have *developed* (as opposed to *deployed*) perl
> code on RHEL. People who write CPAN modules won't have developed it on
> RHEL, and even if they originally developed it on <= 5.16.0 it's unlikely
> that they never tried it on any later perl (apart from abandoned modules),
> nor ignored all the cpantesters reports.
>

While I fully agree people shouldn't be doing any of that, cpanm statistics
suggest 13.4% of all of its users are using RHEL7 *today* (and 1.3% is
using RHEL6). This may actually be lower than the real number as such users
are relatively likely to be using CPAN.pm instead:
http://cpanmetadb.plackperl.org/versions/

Leon

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