Re: Which Perl versions Autoconf needs [PATCH included]

[Paul Eggert]

On 2023-03-30 12:40, Jacob Bachmeyer wrote:

> The closest I have seen so far was the 
> use of the regex \K escape in build-aux/help-extract.pl, except that the 
> tool in question only needs to be run by Autoconf maintainers because 
> its outputs are included in release tarballs

Oh, in that case another possibility is to leave help-extract.pl alone 
and just install the patches I circulated earlier, in 
<https://lists.gnu.org/r/autoconf/2023-03/msg00055.html>. That way, we 
could stick with Zack's presumably nicer code, which is currently in 
help-extract.pl.

If we did that, the guideline would be that Autoconf users can run with 
Perl 5.6+ whereas Autoconf developers need 5.10+. This sort of thing is 
routine.


> Autoconf should stick to its own stated philosophy of 
> testing for features rather than versions.  For Perl, this means that 
> Autoconf should work if all required modules are available

That sounds reasonable, assuming it's easy to do and reliable and 
someone is willing to write and test the code.

That being said, there's little point to doing even work this easy, if 
it's done only to port to versions of Perl so old that nobody really 
wants to use them. Solaris 10 with Perl 5.8.4 is on the edge here; 
anything older is almost surely too old.