On Fri, Aug 20, 2021 at 10:27:59AM -0700, Joe Perches wrote: > Perl 5.8 is nearly 20 years old now. > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_5_version_history > > checkpatch uses regexes that are incompatible with perl versions > earlier than 5.10, but these uses are currently runtime checked > and skipped if the perl version is too old. This runtime checking > skips several useful tests. > > There is also some desire for tools like kernel-doc, checkpatch and > get_maintainer to use a common library of regexes and functions: > https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/YR2lexDd9N0sWxIW@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ > > It'd be useful to set the minimum perl version to something more modern. > > I believe perl 5.14, now only a decade old, is a reasonable target. > > Any objections or suggestions for a newer minimum version? Not an objection per se, but some data points. Oracle Linux 5 (released 2007, still under support) has perl 5.8.8 Oracle Linux 6 (released 2011) has perl 5.10.1 Oracle Linux 7 (released 2014) has perl 5.16.3 Oracle Linux 8 (released 2019) has perl 5.26.3 I don't know that we need to be able to build on a distro from 2007 or even from 2011. I think it's reasonable to require updating to a 2014 distro in order to build a 2021 kernel. For comparison, we currently require gcc-4.9 to build the kernel, and 4.9.0 was released in 2014. So perl-5.16 wouldn't be an unreasonable requirement, I believe.
