[illumos-Developer] Heads up: perl 5.8.4 removal

[Jason King]

On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 10:05 AM, Cedric Blancher
<cedric.blancher at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 9 November 2010 16:40, Garrett D'Amore <garrett at damore.org> wrote:
>> On Tue, 2010-11-09 at 10:41 +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
>>> John Sonnenschein <johnsonnenschein at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> > This is a heads-up mainly for distribution maintainers
>>> >
> One of the great advantages of Sun's /usr/bin/perl was that it never
> had problems with the stability of it's API, unfortunately it was
> unusable for tasks outside the Solaris operating system for many other
> reasons, like the decision to cheat in the SPEC benchmarks for SPARC
> and define that a floating point value uses double and not long
> double, which of course broke perl scripts which assume a certain
> precision in calculations.
> I hope we can do better than Sun and Oracle and provide a stable API
> and precise calculations.

That is certainly possible, but is better handled by the distributions
that choose to do that.

<soapbox>
I'm not sure where things exactly are in the Illumos world wrt to
consolidations (as the exist(ed) in the Opensolaris world), but to use
the older terminology, there is nothing magical special about ON.  It
just happens to be the source code repository where the kernel and
certain utilities are.  Things that go into it (regardless of the
source) have to conform to it's build system.  If this is 3rd party
software with it's own upstream community, this usually means a lot of
needless contortions to get it to build with the ON build system.  SFW
(for example) is much better geared for such things.  Ultimately ON by
itself is not a usable system, you have to have all the other stuff
with it, so there's nothing mythical about it.
</soapbox>