Perl version in KDELibs

[Michael Pyne]

On Sunday, June 05, 2011 22:07:25 Raphael Kubo da Costa wrote:
> Frederik Schwarzer <schwarzer at kde.org> writes:
> > So I changed the affected script and let it require Perl 5.10.
> > 
> > Now I wanted to backport the change to 4.6 but I am not sure if that is
> > OK due to the version bump and the with it changed dependency. So I
> > looked at kdelibs' CMakeLists.txt and found out that it does not state
> > a version.
> > 
> > Does that mean it would also be satisfied by Perl 5.4 or something?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> > Should we set a minimum version there?
> 
> Well, we use CMake's FindPerl.cmake, which does not check Perl's version
> at all. If that's really needed, we could add a FindPerl.cmake to
> kdelibs, but the kde-buildsystem mailing list is a better place to
> discuss that.

AFAICS CMake's FindPerl supports requesting a minimum version just fine, we 
just were not setting a minimum version to look for.

> As for backporting, my opinion is that if we did not previously state a
> minimum dependency version before we are not really breaking any
> dependency version promise (other release-team members might disagree).

Both Perl 5.8 and 5.10 are unsupported by Perl upstream, so it doesn't make 
sense for us to depend on those or anything earlier. 5.10 *was* supported when 
4.6 was released, so I think it makes sense to say that 5.10 at least is 
required from 4.6 on, at least in the case of the affected script for 
backporting purposes.

As far as kdelibs is concerned, we should probably pick a minimum version. It 
doesn't have to be based on what's supported by Perl (i.e. can be based on 
what features we actually need) but "any version" is at least probably 
incorrect. I would recommend 5.10 due to the quantum leap it had over 5.8 but 
I'm interested in hearing other opinions.

Regards,
 - Michael Pyne
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