Tim Bunce <Tim.Bunce@pobox.com> writes:
> On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 01:45:45PM -0800, David E. Wheeler wrote:
>> On Jan 6, 2010, at 12:20 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> One of the things on my to-do list for today is to make configure reject
>>> Perl versions less than $TBD. I thought we had agreed a week or so back
>>> that 5.8 was the lowest safe version because of utf8 and other
>>> considerations.
>>
>> +1, and 5.8.3 at a minimum for utf8 stuff, 5.8.8 much much better.
> I think we said 5.8.1 at the time, but 5.8.3 sounds good to me.
> There would be _very_ few places using < 5.8.6.
I went with 5.8 as the cutoff, for a couple of reasons: we're not in
the business of telling people they ought to be up-to-date, but only of
rejecting versions that demonstrably fail badly; and I found out that
older versions of awk are not sufficiently competent with && and || to
code a more complex test properly :-(. A version check that doesn't
actually do what it claims to is worse than useless, and old buggy awk
is exactly what you'd expect to find on a box with old buggy perl.
(It's also worth noting that the perl version seen at configure time
is not necessarily that seen at runtime, anyway, so there's not a lot
of point in getting too finicky here.)
regards, tom lane