Re: Updating Perl to 5.23?

[Alex Vong <alexvong1995@gmail.com>]

On 13/12/2015, Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il> wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Dec 2015 21:06:53 +0800
> Alex Vong <alexvong1995@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 12/12/2015, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
>> > In ‘core-updates’ I want to fix a couple of non-determinism issues
>> > related to Perl:
>> >
>> >   https://bugs.debian.org/801621
>> >   https://bugs.debian.org/801523
>> >
>> > While at it, I thought we might as well upgrade Perl to 5.23.
>> >
>> > What do people think?  I have no experience with Perl, so I’m not sure
>> > whether this is a minor upgrade, or if it would break lots of things.
>> >
>> > Thanks,
>> > Ludo’.
>> >
>> >
>>
>> According to <http://www.cpan.org/src/README.html>,
>> perl uses the version scheme such that maintenance branches (ready for
>> production use) are even numbers and development branches are odd
>> numbers. Thus, 5.23 is a development branch. From this page
>> <https://packages.debian.org/experimental/perl>, it seems Debian only
>> packages maintenance branches. Perhaps it is too risky to package
>> development branches (break a lot of things). How do you guys think?
>>
>
> In terms of large updates, pkg-config is up to 0.29, python just hit 3.5,
> and
> python2 hit 2.7.11. Although in relation to odd numbers being dev releases,
> I
> don't know about any of the above version changes if they're dev releases
> or
> not.
>
I think they are not. From this PEP
<https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0440/#developmental-releases>,
development releases of python are tagged with `X.Y.devN`.

Also, we can apply the *Debian test*[1]. Debian packaged python 2.7.11
<https://packages.debian.org/sid/python> into unstable, so we should
be fine. Debian also packaged pkg-config 0.29
<https://packages.debian.org/sid/pkg-config>, so it also be fine...

> --
> Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   אפרים פלשנר
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>

[1]: We know Debian is *stable* (even unstable is not unstable, real
testing goes to experimental, the worst thing happened to me was
gnome-3 stopped working), so they should have done the right thing.

Cheers,
Alex