Please restore the ability to install stable Perl versions from 5.8 onward

[FGasper (Felipe Gasper)]

I use Perl frequently in my development, and it is essential for me to compare different Perl versions from time to time.

The following would be like saying that GTK+ 3 “replaces” GTK+ 2. There are significant changes among stable Perl releases that make it not always a simple matter to run the same code on a newer Perl version.

Please restore the ability to install stable Perl versions from 5.8 onward?? Thank you!

Felipe@Felipes-Mac-Pro ~
> sudo port install perl5.14
--->  Fetching distfiles for perl5.14
--->  Verifying checksums for perl5.14
--->  Extracting perl5.14
--->  Configuring perl5.14
Error: perl5.14 has been replaced by perl5.22; please install that instead.
Error: org.macports.configure for port perl5.14 returned: obsolete port
Please see the log file for port perl5.14 for details:
    /opt/local/var/macports/logs/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_lang_perl5/perl5.14/main.log
To report a bug, follow the instructions in the guide:
    http://guide.macports.org/#project.tickets
Error: Processing of port perl5.14 failed

[danielluke (Daniel J. Luke)]

We are moving to provide just one perl (current, stable) - as there aren't enough people interested in maintaining perl in MacPorts to support every version (especially versions that upstream no longer even supports).

I would suggest that if you really need multiple perl versions installed on your machine for development work, you should look to another solution (like perlbrew).

[mojca (Mojca Miklavec)]

Just a (not-so)short reply.

There is/was no technical problem or reason for removal of these ports. The only maintenance problem was keeping all the modules. Keeping just the interpreter wasn't really problematic (even though it make Perl less usable without those modules).

We ship many other software packages that only come at a fixed version and get updated on a regular basis, so that there is no way of going back. You can't compile your documents with TeX Live 2012, even though that might give you different result from TeX Live 2015 for example. You cannot switch to an older version of libpng, subversion (name any other software for that matter). We also removed python24, python25, python30, python31, ... clang up to version 3.2. (On the other hand we keep gcc43, Apache 1 and a zillion of other outdated and unmaintained packages that nobody even notices are still there and completely broken.)

So at some point certain decisions have to be made: whether or not to keep an old software around. Keeping an old version of Perl is hardly of interest to an average user, but I imagine there are developers who might want to test their packages against different versions of Perl. If nothing else, if they want to support older versions of (system) Perl on Mac OS X, it might be handy to be able to test whether something works or not.

For those users there are currently two options:

• install Perl from a different source (either from source or from a binary package)
• create a local repository and fetch the old Portfiles from MacPorts' SVN:

  svn co https://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/trunk/dports/lang/perl5.14@131310
  

(or hypothetically get a vote from more users & developers who would agree that keeping those old versions around would be beneficial for the community).

If the ports are of benefit to a single user, it might be best to do a checkout from SVN. If there is a large group of users who desperately need these old versions, one could discuss that on the user mailing list.

An alternative would be to create a "graveyard" with outdated ports (such as Perl 5.8, Apache 1, GCC 4.3, python 2.4, Qt 3, wxWidgets 2.8) that wouldn't be included in the distribution and wouldn't generally be maintained, but so that users could easily use them (at their own risk), in a similar way as HomeBrew provides add-on packages in separate repositories (scientific package, ...)