Bug#708239: Package description outdated?

[gregor herrmann]

On Tue, 14 May 2013 14:00:26 +0200, Martin Eberhard Schauer wrote:

> the (third paragraph of the) recent package description (1) still refers to
> Perl 5.10. On my Squeeze box I get
> 
>   $ dpkg -l perl
>   …
>   ii  perl   5.10.1-17squeez Larry Wall's Practical Extraction and Report L
> 
> The current text is:
> 
>     This enables the strict and warnings pragmas, as well as all of the
>     features available in Perl 5.10. It also enables C3 method resolution
>     order as documented in `perldoc mro' and loads IO::File and IO::Handle
>     so that you may call methods on filehandles. In the future, it may
>     include additional core modules and pragmas.
> 
> To be honest, I did not understand the implications of (2) to the paragraph
> quoted above. But as 5.10 is available for quite some time, perhaps
> 
>   "as well as all of the features available in Perl 5.10"
> 
> might be skipped. 

I don't think this is a good idea, since the original idea of
Modern::Perl was to enable the new feature introduced in Perl 5.10.

Perl 5.10 introduced new stuff but for backward compatibility these
features have to be explicitly enabled (which itself is a new feature
:)). chromatic's idea was to enable authors to just write "use
Modern::Perl;" to get all the new stuff instead of manually adding
it.

And this still holds true today with 5.16 and 5.18; e.g. you don't
get "say" or "given/when" (introduced back in Perl 5.10) without "use
5.010;" or "use feature 'say';" or "use Modern::Perl;".

(I hope I got the details right :))

Maybe "available since Perl 5.10" might be less confusing?
(The text is copied verbatim from upstream.)

> Is
>   "In the future, it may include additional core modules and pragmas."
> still valid?

Yes, new releases add new features; cf. the POD/manpage.

We might indeed update the long description a bit with the additions
upstream made in newer versions ...
 
Cheers,
gregor


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