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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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chromatic's Second Law of Backwards Compatibility 6 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Those who don't take reality into account make up laws instead and then kick people in the head for not following them

    • I'll put you on the "pro" side of literal tabs in Makefiles then, and five years of completely broken Scalar::Util in ActivePerl.

      • How is Scalar::Util broken in ActivePerl it is (at least supposed to be) the same as in core Perl.

        • As I understand it, it doesn't include (all of?) the XS components of the module, making reftype() unavailable for the ActivePerl 5.8.x releases.

          The explanation I heard (and I don't remember where, though I'm pretty sure it wasn't from you) is that one goal of the ActivePerl releases for 5.8.x was to maintain binary compatibility back to 5.8.0, and thus there would be no reftype() available for Scalar::Util.

          When I last looked at which of my distributions failed in the AS build and test farm, most of the

          • You might have heard it from me, although I'm not sure it was (only) reftype()... might also have been weaken().

            ActivePerl on Windows maintains binary compatibility, and it does so for business reasons.

            As a result Scalar::Util, and hence all interesting packages (as in like 40% of all CPAN modules) are broken on ActivePerl, and can't be fixed for business reasons.

            This is why I never got to demo PPI on my own laptop at the Perl Conference the year I want, which triggered off a year-long attempt to get them t
            • 12,000 is the number of downloads of ActivePerl for Windows every 2-3 days (downloads for other platforms are significantly lower). Which is why breaking backwards compatibility in the PPM repository is a big deal.

              Of course all of these issues are really just pointing out faults in the original setup of the PPM and build farm infrastructure. Unfortunately it is a lot of work to get it cleaned up. We are currently testing adding additional repositories that are built with 5.8.8. We have already changed the default repository URL in ActivePerl 819 and later to be version specific, so we can redirect them to more up-to-date repositories once they are operational.
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