173495 - require perl 5.6

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Bugzilla :: Bugzilla-General, defect)

Description

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

As discussed on [e-mail], perl5.005 is old, and has taintness
interactions with TT. Most of the bugzilla developers use a newer version of
perl, which means that it doesn't get testing - witness bug 160710, which went
5.5 months between the cause being commited, and the bug eventually being
noticed after 2.16 was released

Since we want to be able to [% PROCESS "foo-$format.html.tmpl" %] as we move
bugzilla to be more generic, we need to resolve this.

It may be possible to work out where TT is triggering this bug, and then change
TT. However, that doesn't guarantee that there aren't other 5.005 issues lurking
which noone is detecting.

I'll post to the newsgroup after I submit this (so that I have a bug #), but if
I don't get anyone with a very good reason to avoid this, I'll do this next week.

Note that, regardless of this bug, we will be requiring 5.005_03 RSN, and newer
DBI versions require that. Anyone wanting an earlier version than that will be
ignored :)

Comment 1

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

Attachment: patch

Also uses $] to get the version number.

Comment 2

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Comment on attachment 103175 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

It works.  We've been bandying this about on mozilla-webtools for several
months and nobody's objected yet, except for Andreas, and he admitted he'd
probably upgrade Perl if we did it.

Comment 3

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

Checked in.

Noone objected after a week on npm.webtools, either

Comment 4

[[e-mail]]

Please don't require Perl 5.6! I (and lots of other people) are running Perl 
5.005_03 and are unable to upgrade.

Comment 5

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

Too late ;)

The real reason for this is that we wre running into perl 5.005 limitations
which could not be worked arround without a lot of effort. It also routinely
broke, since noone was developing on it. For example, see bug 160710 which went
through 2-3 release canditates before being noticed in the final 2.16.0 version
six months after the cause was checked in.

perl 5.6.0 was released 2.5 years ago, which is ages in computing terms ;) By
the time bugzilla 2.18 comes out, it will be closer to 3 years.