[gentoo-dev] perl-5.10 inclusion

[Lars Wendler]

Hello list,

I already talked about this topic yesterday in #-dev. 
perl-5.10 is out since end of 2007 [1] and we still don't have it in our main 
portage-tree but rather have it kinda rotting in the perl-experimental 
overlay. 
I know that the perl team is badly understaffed with only one active dev who 
is not even on the member list (is that right, tove?) but there has to be 
done something. We cannot stick with perl-5.8 forever.
So my suggestion is to ask for help here. Anybody willing to help please grab 
the perl-experimental overlay, install {lib,}perl-5.10 and start to use it on 
a regular basis. If you don't mind, try to install as much perl-packages as 
possible and report back any failures to our bugzilla.
I already started on that and "infected" two of my systems with perl-5.10. My 
VM (which I originally only set up for testing of kde-4) is currently running 
a 'USE="perl" emerge -e @world' and till now 320 out of 550 packages 
installed without any problems on that machine.
Next step will be to go though perl-core and dev-perl categories and install 
every package being in there.
My intention is to get a picture about how many packages are broken with 
perl-5.10. The fixing of those packages is something I unfortunately cannot 
do (I'm a complete perl-noob) but maybe this is a good start getting 
perl-5.10 finally into portage.
By the way, as soon as I find the first packages being broken with perl-5.10 I 
will open a tracker bug in bugzilla. So watch out for it if you stumble about 
failing packages with perl-5.10 yourself.

Lars Wendler (Polynomial-C)
Gentoo Staffer and bug-wrangler

[1] according to the perl website version 5.10 is more than one year and seven 
months old: http://www.cpan.org/src/README.html