[OpenIndiana-discuss] FLAG DAY: Default perl updated from 5.22 to 5.34

[Marcel Telka]

Perl 5.34 is deafult now
------------------------

After more than 5 years we switched our default perl from 5.22 to 5.34.
This includes update in illumos-gate where now perl modules for 5.34 are
built by default and support for 5.22 modules is obsoleted.

Perl 5.34 was updated from 5.34.0 to 5.34.1 about a week ago.


illumos-gate nightly
--------------------

The change of default perl constitutes a flag-day for people building
illumos-gate on OpenIndiana hipster.

After you update your build machine to latest bits, the previously
installed runtime/perl-522/module/sun-solaris package should be no
longer installed and new runtime/perl-534/module/sun-solaris should
appear there.  Once this happens you need to have the system-perl
mediator set to 5.34 to build the illumos-gate successfully.  Please
note that system-perl mediator defaults to 5.34 now, so usually you
should be safe.

To confirm the current system-perl mediator you could run the following
command:

    # pkg mediator system-perl

Basically, the above should match the installed sun-solaris module:

    # pkg list | grep "runtime/perl-.*/module/sun-solaris"

So if you have runtime/perl-534/module/sun-solaris installed, the
system-perl mediator should be set to 5.34.  As noted above, this is
default now.

In addition, you very likely want to update your env file (illumos.sh) to
contain following lines so runtime/perl-534/module/sun-solaris package
is properly built during illumos-gate nightly:

    export PERL_VERSION="5.34"
    export PERL_VARIANT="-thread-multi"
    export PERL_PKGVERS="-534"
    export BUILDPERL32="#"


Future of perl in OpenIndiana
-----------------------------

Perl 5.36 (version 5.36.0; released on 2022-05-28) was added to the repo
today as a preview.  To install it you could run

    # pkg install runtime/perl-536

There are currently no additional perl modules built with support for
perl 5.36, so usability of perl 5.36 is limited.  It is expected that
all perl modules will be rebuilt (and possibly updated) in following
days (or weeks) to get their full support for perl 5.36.

Both perl 5.22 and 5.24 are already EOLed by Perl maintainers so please
switch your perl projects to perl 5.34+ ASAP.  We plan to obsolete perl
5.22 and 5.24 packages in OpenIndiana hipster soon.


Thanks.

-- 
+-------------------------------------------+
| Marcel Telka   e-mail:   marcel at telka.sk  |
|                homepage: http://telka.sk/ |
+-------------------------------------------+