[Net-ssleay-devel] Testers for svn trunk, please.

[Florian Ragwitz]

On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 07:41:19PM +1000, Mike McCauley wrote:
> Hello Florian,
> 
> On Tuesday 25 July 2006 18:29, Florian Ragwitz wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 10:14:03AM +1000, Mike McCauley wrote:
> > > Hello Florian,
> > >
> > > Sorry for the delay in replying... I was travelling.
> > >
> > > On Thursday 20 July 2006 22:05, Florian Ragwitz wrote:
> > > > Hello there,
> > > >
> > > > I've done some work on Net::SSLeay in the last days and would like to
> > > > hear some feedback. The most important changes include:
> > > >
> > > > * Use Module::Install instead of ExtUtils::MakeMaker.
> > >
> > > Not sure I like this one: Module::Install does not seem to be a standard
> > > module, so it becomes another barrier to installing. It has some
> > > extensive prerequisites, too.
> >
> > Not quite. Module::Install will only needed to be installed on the
> > developers machines. When doing make dist it will get bundled into the
> > inc/ directory and therefor isn't a build-time dependency. Also it
> > allows you to bundle other dependencies like Test::Exception so the user
> > doesn't need to install it himself.
> 
> Well..... OK. Is it really better that way?

I think so. Just compare the mess in Makefile.PL before and after. Also
there is a large number of different versions of perl and module
installers infrastructure, primarily CPAN.pm, CPANPLUS.pm,
ExtUtils::MakeMaker and Module::Build. These have accumulated greatly
varying feature and bug profiles over the years, and it is now very
difficult to write an installer  that will work properly using only the
installed versions of these modules.

Rather than try to target one specific installer and/or make you add
twisty workaround expressions to every piece of install code you
write, Module::Install will copy part of itself into each module
distribution it creates.

This allows new improvements to be used in your installers regardless of
the age of the system a distribution is being installed on, at the cost
of a small increase in the size of your distribution.


Copied from M::I's documentation.

> > > > Also the new test suite uses warnings.pm and probably other stuff which
> > > > isn't available in perl pre-5.6. Would you consider that an issue?
> > >
> > > Yes.
> >
> > In what way? How would you deal with that? I haven't seen a pre-5.6 perl
> > for ages now and wonder, even if someone still runs it, if he would
> > upgrade Net::SSLeay on that installation if he didn't upgrade his perl
> > for years.
> 
> I believe we still have customers on 5.6. We still try to support 5.005! Some 
> relatively modern Unix distros still come with pretty old Perls.
> I think we could live with '5.6 or later' but not 'later than 5.6'

As I said, it doesn't work on pre-5.6 perls. So perl >= 5.6 should work (I
tested it with 5.6.2 only). I also think we can live with that.
Nevertheless it would be a worthwhile goal to get 5.005 or 5.004
compatibility back, but I'm not too sure how large the compromises we
would need to make to support older perls would be.


-Flo
-- 
BOFH excuse #92:
Stale file handle (next time use Tupperware(tm)!)
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