Paul Eggert wrote:
On 2023-03-30 06:06, Zack Weinberg wrote:
Are you, Jacob Bachmeyer, volunteering to maintain the Perl scripts in
autoconf and automake, for at least the next several years, and in
particular to test compatibility with these very old versions of Perl?
Although testing Jacob's little patch with old Perl versions is of
course needed now, surely a multi-year support commitment is not
necessary. If that patch (along with my draft-but-not-installed
patches) ports Autoconf to Perl 5.6, then that should be good enough
for the next Autoconf release as we're not planning any substantive
changes before then.
I agree that we should not commit Autoconf to sticking with 5.6 for
the next several years. We might even increase the minimum Perl
requirement in the very next Autoconf release if that is needed.
I also agree that legitimate reasons exist to require a Perl newer than
5.6, or 5.8, or even newer than 5.10. I just have yet to see one that
actually applies to Autoconf and/or Automake. The rationales given so
far, of core modules in 5.10 that were available from CPAN in 5.6 (or,
as in the case of Time::HiRes, were actually core modules in 5.8 but
were used to purportedly justify a requirement for 5.10) have been more
excuses than legitimate reasons. The closest I have seen so far was the
use of the regex \K escape in build-aux/help-extract.pl, except that the
tool in question only needs to be run by Autoconf maintainers because
its outputs are included in release tarballs, and there was a perfectly
good equivalent regex previously used that my patch restored. (I could
rewrite that function to actually parse for backslash escapes instead of
escaping interpolations, but I wanted to keep the patch trivial if
possible and reinstating older code is copyright-trivial while writing
significant new code is not.)
I also argue that Autoconf should stick to its own stated philosophy of
testing for features rather than versions. For Perl, this means that
Autoconf should work if all required modules are available, whether they
were bundled with perl, installed from CPAN, or updated from CPAN after
being initially installed bundled with perl.
-- Jacob
