428793 - Unless you build the documentation yourself, it may lie to you about minimum requirements

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Bugzilla :: Documentation, defect)

Description

[Marc Schumann [:Wurblzap]]

We have different minimum requirements for the CGI module, depending on the Perl version in use. For this, bug 416382 implemented a hack in Bugzilla/Install/Requirements.pm, where the Perl version the script is running under determines the minimum version requirements. This works very well for checksetup.pl.

For documentation, though, you're likely to see one built on a system with a different version of Perl. The minimum version requirements will then not apply to you. For example, you may want to install Bugzilla on a Perl 5.10 system, and to prepare, you read http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/tip/html/installation.html#install-perlmodules. You'll see minimum requirements for Perl 5.8.

Maybe we need a disclaimer in the documentation along the lines of “these minimum requirements apply only if you plan to run Perl version <perl-version-of-documentation-build-here>; if your Perl is of a different version, there may be different minimum requirements”.

Or, we could evolve the hack into a real structure which inherently allows for different versions of Perl and works well for both checksetup.pl and documentation. This would mean showing all differing Perl variants in the documentation, not only the one the documentation has been built on.

Comment 1

[Colin Ogilvie [:cso]]

Maybe we want to evolve the list of modules into a table along the lines of:

+--------+---------+----------+
| Module | Perl5.8 | Perl5.10 |
+--------+---------+----------+
| CGI    | blah    | blah     |
| DBI    | blah    | blah     |
+--------+---------+----------+

I suspect this could be represented in Checksetup easily enough which would enable us to continue to dynamically generate versions...

The only issue is that we'd now need to generate XML instead of/along with a list of entities and may need to refactor checksetup.

Comment 2

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

I don't think we need a whole table--the only module that differs across versions is CGI.

We should just add a note that for Perl 5.10 the required version of CGI is 3.33, and for 5.8 it's whatever, 3.19 or whatever we require.

Comment 4

[Frédéric Buclin]

Bugzilla 3.2 is restricted to security bugs only. Moreover, this bug is either assigned to nobody or got no traction for several months now. Rather than retargetting it at each new release, I'm clearing the target milestone and the bug will be retargetted to some sensible release when someone starts fixing this bug for real (Bugzilla 3.8 more likely).

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

The docs no longer give Perl module versions, partly for the reasons given above, and also the new docs build system makes it impossible to get the info in.

Gerv