Re: Minimum perl version supported

On Dec 21, 2009, at 7:46 AM, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>  
wrote:
> 2009/12/21 Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>:
>> On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 5:45 AM, Tim Bunce <Tim.Bunce@pobox.com>  
>> wrote:
>>> FYI Perl 5.6.0 was released in March 2000. 5.6.2 in November 2003.
>>
>> Gosh, I feel old.  I started on Perl 4.036.
>>
>>>> What is worth a little bit of effort to establish is exactly what
>>>> version of Perl we're already depending on, so that we can document
>>>> that for the benefit of future tool writers.  There's no reason why
>>>> this particular thing needs to be compatible further back than  
>>>> what is
>>>> already required otherwise.
>>>
>>> I'd like to know the earliest version of perl that's supported for
>>> PL/Perl, if that's ever been determined (I've not seen it in the  
>>> docs).
>>>
>>> plperl requires Safe v2.09, released in Oct 2003 and included in  
>>> 5.8.1.
>>> That version, and later versions, have only been tested back to  
>>> perl 5.6.
>>>
>>> I'd recommend Perl 5.6(.2) as a minimum for threads/multiplicity.
>>> Perl 5.5 had complelely different, and unsafe, code for threads
>>> and no concept of multiplicity.
>>>
>>> I'd recommend Perl 5.8(.1) as a minimum for UTF-8 databases.
>>> Perl 5.7 had a complelely different, and flawed, concept of
>>> Unicode operation.
>>>
>>> Tim.
>>>
>>> p.s. I'll test PL/Perl with perl 5.6.2 (assuming I can still build  
>>> it on
>>> my system) as part of testing the PL/Perl patches I'm working on.
>>
>> It's possible that we might support building the release in general
>> with an older version of Perl than what we support for PL/perl, but  
>> it
>> sounds like we may have already burned this bridge if the MSVC stuff
>> expects something newer.  Maybe we should just document that 5.6 is
>
> The MSVC stuff is only tested on 5.8.
>
>> the minimum supported version to build from source and be done with  
>> it
>> (we should clarify what MSVC requires).  If someone is running a  
>> 1990s
>
> You mean somehting like
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/install-win32-full.html#AEN23266

Yeah, very much like that. :-)

...Robert