[illumos-Developer] On Perl

[Alexander Eremin]

On Mar 15, 2011, at 8:11 PM, John Sonnenschein wrote:

> As you all may know, right now Illumos has a forced dependency on  
> perl 5.10.0 ( strictly .0 ) to build and run. That particular  
> version of perl has a number of issues that make it a less-than- 
> ideal candidate for the blessed system perl such as slowness  
> unrolling @_ and broken ~~ semantics.
>
> There is also the issue that updating micro releases ( 5.10.0 ->  
> 5.10.1 ) requires coordination amongst all the distros as well as  
> illumos itself, because the O/N tree looks to /usr/perl5/<3-point  
> version>/ to build modules for Kstat, Projects, Intrd, and so forth
>
> I have introduced perl 5.12.3 in to illumos-extra such that it  
> delivers to /usr/perl5/5.12 and have changes for O/N that can build  
> the modules correctly (non-packaging O/N changes are here: https://gist.github.com/871005 
>  )
>
> Should these changes (as well as packaging dependency changes which  
> I have not yet done) go in we would get the advantage of being able  
> to upgrade micro releases with no change to O/N or coordination  
> amongst distributions, and a much more robust and faster Perl being  
> the mandated system perl rather than an old broken version.
>
> On the downside though, it would require a one-time (for 512)  
> coordination with the distribution maintainers. This may not  
> ultimately be a bad thing, as upgrading to the less-broken 5.10.1  
> needs the same amount of work, and any subsequent version does as  
> well.
>
> What would need to change on the distribution side is to deliver one  
> extra package, the name of which I have no opinion of (though I do  
> think that it should be micro-version agnostic such as perl-512 or  
> similar) which delivers /usr/perl5/5.12 , and the /usr/perl5/bin/ 
> perl symlink . This requires no change to /usr/bin/perl, since no  
> system software depends on it.
>
> It should be noted that the dependency on illumos-extra is not  
> strict. Should the distribution maintainers wish to deliver perl  
> 5.12 their own way, given that they deliver it to /usr/perl5/5.12  
> with the /usr/perl5/bin/perl symlink they are more than welcome to  
> do so.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> -JohnS_______________________________________________
> Developer mailing list
> Developer at lists.illumos.org
> http://lists.illumos.org/m/listinfo/developer

Nice. One wish -  dtrace support should be enabled in 5.12.3
  and all perl scripts in illumos should have universal exec path,  
which is not dependent
from perl version.


Thanks,
:: Alexander