Re: RFC: Bump minimum Perl to 5.18.0 for next major release of both Autoconf and Automake

[Karl Berry]

    raise the minimum version requirement for Perl to 5.18.0

Sounds sensible to me, for the reasons you outlined.

But, I think it would be wise to give users a way to override the
requirement, of course with the caveat "don't blame us if it doesn't
work", unless there are true requirements such that nothing at all would
work without 5.18.0 -- which seems unlikely (and undesirable, IMHO).
2013 is not that long ago, in autotime.

    don't know what the Automake maintainers' current release schedule

We (I, at least, and I'm pretty sure it's true for Jim too) have no schedule.

    looks like but I imagine this would be targeted for 1.17.0, 

I guess we would declare the version making this change as 1.17.0.
I don't have any other plans that would involve a new minor version.

    that happens (ideally at about the same time as the Autoconf release
    making the same change).

Sounds feasible, since it doesn't sound like it will be especially quick
(I'm glad). --thanks, karl.