Paul Eggert wrote:
On 2023-03-30 12:40, Jacob Bachmeyer wrote:
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
Oh, in that case another possibility is to leave help-extract.pl alone
and just install the patches I circulated earlier, in
<https://lists.gnu.org/r/autoconf/2023-03/msg00055.html>. That way, we
could stick with Zack's presumably nicer code, which is currently in
help-extract.pl.
If we did that, the guideline would be that Autoconf users can run
with Perl 5.6+ whereas Autoconf developers need 5.10+. This sort of
thing is routine.
This is a possibility.
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
That sounds reasonable, assuming it's easy to do and reliable and
someone is willing to write and test the code.
That being said, there's little point to doing even work this easy, if
it's done only to port to versions of Perl so old that nobody really
wants to use them. Solaris 10 with Perl 5.8.4 is on the edge here;
anything older is almost surely too old.
In this case, making 5.8.4 work should also give us 5.6 support.
More generally, there is no guarantee that even core modules will
actually be available, since distribution packagers *can* separate them
into other packages. The modules that originated on CPAN and were later
bundled, like Time::HiRes and Digest::SHA, are still modules. You
cannot reliably determine the availability of Perl modules by testing
the Perl core version. That is why I keep harping on the issue.
-- Jacob
