Re: Minimum perl version supported

On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 5:45 AM, Tim Bunce <Tim(dot)Bunce(at)pobox(dot)com> wrote:
> FYI Perl 5.6.0 was released in March 2000. 5.6.2 in November 2003.

Gosh, I feel old. I started on Perl 4.036.

>> What is worth a little bit of effort to establish is exactly what
>> version of Perl we're already depending on, so that we can document
>> that for the benefit of future tool writers.  There's no reason why
>> this particular thing needs to be compatible further back than what is
>> already required otherwise.
>
> I'd like to know the earliest version of perl that's supported for
> PL/Perl, if that's ever been determined (I've not seen it in the docs).
>
> plperl requires Safe v2.09, released in Oct 2003 and included in 5.8.1.
> That version, and later versions, have only been tested back to perl 5.6.
>
> I'd recommend Perl 5.6(.2) as a minimum for threads/multiplicity.
> Perl 5.5 had complelely different, and unsafe, code for threads
> and no concept of multiplicity.
>
> I'd recommend Perl 5.8(.1) as a minimum for UTF-8 databases.
> Perl 5.7 had a complelely different, and flawed, concept of
> Unicode operation.
>
> Tim.
>
> p.s. I'll test PL/Perl with perl 5.6.2 (assuming I can still build it on
> my system) as part of testing the PL/Perl patches I'm working on.

It's possible that we might support building the release in general
with an older version of Perl than what we support for PL/perl, but it
sounds like we may have already burned this bridge if the MSVC stuff
expects something newer. Maybe we should just document that 5.6 is
the minimum supported version to build from source and be done with it
(we should clarify what MSVC requires). If someone is running a 1990s
version of Perl in 2010 when 8.5 comes out, they can always make
distprep on another machine. There can't be many people who will want
a brand-new PostgreSQL and an ancient Perl, I think.

...Robert