On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 9:58 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Sorry, I should have checked myself. defined-or "//" is 5.8.1 or later. > > Now the real question was if we still support anything older, and if so > what is the bottom version? > > I certainly can go with "5.8.1 or later", but I vaguely recall during the > gitweb discussion we said anything without the utf-8 support is unusable > for gitweb, but I think we also said that the rest of the git codebase > should support running with something older (5.6.1, perhaps). 15 minutes of research: * 2006-06-25 Junio C Hamano: "Tentatively let's say our cut-off point is somewhere around 5.6." -- http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/22607 * 2008-05-30 Lea Wiemann: "Gitweb relies on Unicode support (e.g. "use Encode") and will continue to be compatible with 5.8 and 5.10 only" -- http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/83339 * 2008-08-13 Lea Wiemann: "This makes Git.pm dependent on Perl 5.6.1. Some tests (like t3701-add-interactive.sh) seem to work with pretty much any Perl version out there, and requiring File::Spec changes this" -- http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/92260 * 2008-08-15 Marcus Griep: "Git.pm: Make File::Spec and File::Temp requirement lazy" -- c14c8ce * 2008-08-30 Junio C Hamano: "I agree we should say we rely on 5.6 or newer." -- http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/94399 * 2008-09-01 Junio C Hamano: "I personally think it is probably Ok to declare that we do depend on 5.8" -- http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/94523 So here's my take-away. For the *.perl scripts and gitweb, it's 5.8.0. For the test suite and Git.pm, all Perl versions are theoretically supported, but for practical purposes, it may be 5.6.0. Whatever is decided this time, perhaps it should be burned into the tops of the *.perl scripts (i.e. "require 5.008;"). It should also be added to CodingGuidelines. You know, so this conversation doesn't keep recurring. :-) j. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html