Features/Perl510

Move to Perl 5.10.0

Summary

Update perl in Fedora 9 to 5.10.0.

Owner

• Name: TomCallaway

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 9
• Last updated: 2008-03-10
• Percentage of completion: 100%

Detailed Description

Perl 5.10.0 was recently released. This is the first new "major" release in the perl5 series in quite some time, and it incorporates the majority of the perl patchsets that Red Hat/Fedora had previously been carrying for years.

Benefit to Fedora

The Perl interpreter itself is faster with a smaller memory footprint, and has several UTF-8 and threading improvements. The Perl installation is now relocatable, a blessing for systems administrators and operating system packagers. Adds a new smart match operator, a switch statement, named captures, state variables, and better error messages.

Moving to perl 5.10.0 will continue Fedora's strategy of being on the cutting-edge, and will encourage perl developers to use Fedora.

Scope

Initially build packages with perl 5.10.0 in a separate component (dist-f9-perl), with separate buildroots. Once the core packages (see Test Plan) have been successfully rebuilt against perl 5.10.0, those new packages will be retagged into dist-f9-perl. The remaining packages will then be rebuilt in dist-f9-perl. Some modules which were previously packaged independently are now part of the perl 5.10.0 SRPM, and will need to be blocked from dist-f9+.

Test Plan

~ 300 packages were identified as the core set of perl dependencies upon which all of the other perl-related packages needed to rebuild. All of these packages will be built against perl-5.10.0 in dist-f9-perl, to ensure that perl-5.10.0 is reliable enough for use.

All other packages dependent on perl 5.8.8 are to be rebuilt. When all packages are rebuilt, they will be imported into rawhide.

Dependencies

None.

Contingency Plan

While unpleasant, it would be possible to back to perl-5.8.8 (or 5.8.9, depending on when that releases). We would need to untag all the rebuilt packages, and unblock the modules that were added to 5.10.0 (but not in 5.8.*).

Documentation

For details see http://perldoc.perl.org/perldelta.html

Release Notes

Reference to perldelta needs to be added.

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