Developers of Sympa

[Marc Chantreux <address@concealed>]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 07:53:06PM +0100, Guillaume Rousse wrote:
> This would also make installing Sympa on RHEL 5.x and clones
> (Centos, Scientific Linux, ...) really more difficult for many
> people, as perl 5.10 is not available out-of-the-box for those
> platforms.

Please don't take the sympa bond in a cave because of RH! 

I installed Perl applications on a lot of systems (including windows,
macos using macports) and RH based linux way the worse experience i
made in many ways. It is so broken that even installing a CPAN module is
a challenge and we ended up with tarballs including the whole files
needed (even a compiled perl interpreter) to provide our users a sane
base [1].

We just can't rely on RH perl toolchain so if RH is an important target,
we really should consider providing this kind of tarballs (updating is
an rsync process).

5.8 was released in 2003 !!!! is 4 "end of live" distributions of Perl
forward (last release was in 2008: http://www.cpan.org/src/) and there
where a lot of improvements since (not only in the langage: perl is
faster, lower memory footprint, it improved its unicode support) and
every system i know comes with at least 5.14 (5.16 is the standard).

As perl 5.20 will come very soon now, Perl 5.16 support will be ended
(so we'll have 5 "perl dead bodies to handle"), loosing all the amazing
of modern perl because of RH base is reaaaaallly sad.

can't we poll the community about it ? can we ask them the distributions
they are using ? 

> Basically, this is a trade-off between "what do we gain, as
> developpers" vs "how much effort will we have to educate our user
> base to handle the change". And I'm happily leaving this kind of
> decision for David :) 

Sure!

David: I can connect you to the QA manager of the koha community. 
Koha also have a long history and customers running koha on very old
boxes. they choosen the "debian perl gives the tempo" and added a strict 
rule: no box upgrade: no koha upgrade. Maybe you should talk :)   

regards

[1]: 

    David, Etienne: I remember a chat we had about relying more on
    CPAN and you said you had a bad experience (which really surprised me). 

    I just realized you use Centos which is a RHLE derrivative (i don't
    know how far it derives) so i undersand: RH is the pb! not CPAN 


-- 
Marc Chantreux
Université de Strasbourg, Direction Informatique
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