It's all ASPLODY!

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On Mon, 2008-11-24 at 12:19 -0800, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-11-24 at 14:15 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> > 
> > > Perl was updated from 5.8 to 5.10 for Fedora 9.  If you want to call
> > > that a regression, have fun in your little fantasy world.
> > 
> > Did that trigger a need to rebuild anything? The only 
> > non-backwards-compatible change I've ever seen in perl was when it 
> > started to interpolate @ in double-quoted strings between 4.x and 5.x.
> 
> Yes, for a variety of reasons the packages needed to be rebuilt.  Many
> had to be altered too, as many things were brought into perl core that
> were addons previously, and rpm spec files had to be adjusted.  Spot can
> fill you in on the more technical details.

Perl is extremely major version dependent. Every perl module (basically,
anything more complex than a script) had to be rebuilt, and in many
cases, upstream bugs had to be filed and fixed before we could retain
functionality. I worked aggressively with upstream to both submit the
majority of our Fedora only perl patches into the 5.10 tree and to work
through the issues discovered during the migration.

End result: We're closer to perl upstream than we've ever been, and we
have most of the long-standing perl bugs resolved (and we fixed the
"RHEL slow perl" bug without even being aware of it as a byproduct of
the methodology).

The fact that you just noticed it means that we must have done some
things properly, you're welcome. :)

~spot