[illumos-Developer] Heads up: perl 5.8.4 removal

[John Sonnenschein]

This is a heads-up mainly for distribution maintainers

with the putback of:

377 removal of perl 5.8.4

Perl 5.8.4 and it's packages ( perl-584, perl-584/extras ) are no longer being delivered. One important result of this is that the /usr/perl5/bin/perl and /usr/bin/perl is also not being delivered.

Since the package was not officially obsoleted, the status quo is OpenSolaris and OpenIndiana installs that are installed or onu(1)'ed will pull in the package from the latest available version in the repository. It is suggested that distributions continue to deliver a perl-584 package to satisfy dependencies. It is not required that this package deliver the /usr/bin/perl symlink, but it must be either 5.8.4 or 5.10.0 due to the requisite modules.

Going forward, I'd like to start a discussion about how to satisfy the package & runtime dependencies of intrd(1M), projects(5) and so forth in a way that O/N doesn't force distro developers in to tight constraints.

Thank you
-JohnS