help2man Portfile hardcoded versions breaks some perl installations

[davidfavor (David Favor)]

Installing newer versions of perl, as in... port install perl5 +perl5_14 +shared +threads causes hardcoded perl versions in the help2man Portfile to create subtle build errors.

It appears the maintainer may have been trying to force perl5.12 or above.

Suggest changing all occurrences of perl5.12 to perl5 which appears to resolve the problem.

Priority set to high as current state of Portfile disallows installing X11.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Ports should not rely on "perl5" existing; they should use a specific version of perl, like help2man does. In what way does this prevent X11 from installing? Can you show a main.log file?

[drkp (Dan Ports)]

help2man installs /opt/local/bin/help2man, which begins with

#!/opt/local/bin/perl -w

...so it's using whatever version of perl is selected by the perl5 port. If it's trying to force perl5.12, it needs to fix that path too.

(I suspect this is not the only port with this problem. Right now, I don't have much confidence that anything will work correctly if perl5 is installed with +perl5_14 or anything other than +perl5_12... *sigh*)

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

#32171