Re^2: annoying upgrade issue

[geektron]

well, i originally had 5.005 and 5.6.1 on the machine ( 5.005 is the 'standard' FreeBSD version, and that fact still annoys me ), and a 5.6.1 that i had installed from source ( if not from source, via CPAN.pm upgrade ... i can't remember now )

i didn't realize that there were binary incompatibililites ... i guess i have *more* upgrade work on the box to do ... which, unfortunately, is going to have to wait until i can figure out why the damned thing keeps rebooting itself for now good reason.

[tomhukins]

5.005 is the 'standard' FreeBSD version, and that fact still annoys me

This isn't strictly true. In FreeBSD-4, 5.005 has been retained as the base Perl to avoid incompatibility problems for users tracking -STABLE. If the version of Perl in the base system changed, these users would also have to update Perl modules when updating the base system. This would likely result in lots of angry users and support problems.

It's easy enough to install 5.6.x from lang/perl5, or 5.8.x from lang/perl5.8 and run use.perl port. The pkg-message file for both these ports, which should be displayed after installation, documents this.

As of FreeBSD-5, Perl no longer ships in the base system to help avoid these problems. In the long term, FreeBSD aims to ship a smaller base system with more functionality moved out to packages.

[geektron]

corrected. i'm still on the 4.x series ( a 4.9 kernel to be specific, and once it stablilzed, up to 4.10 -- didn't want to jump 2 versions ).

i did install from lang/perl5.8 .. just didn't use the use.perl port because i've never seen it before.

there doesn't seem to be a manpage or perldoc for it ...