Steady maintenance

Posted Jun 12, 2024 12:23 UTC (Wed) by bs338 (subscriber, #47218)
Parent article: perl v5.40.0 released

[There's a small typo in the article, it should just be ':reader' without the second colon]

I know summarising the significant changes is generally interesting, but my takeaway from the release is that perl is able to hold down a steady release cadence with a core cadre of committers. This means that anyone using perl today can be rely on it continuing to be available!

Picking something old at random, I see Expect hasn't had a release since 2018. So anyone using it on an up-to-date Linux distro is now relying on that distro to keep it working without a very active upstream.

Steady maintenance

Posted Jun 12, 2024 16:21 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

> Picking something old at random, I see Expect hasn't had a release since 2018. So anyone using it on an up-to-date Linux distro is now relying on that distro to keep it working without a very active upstream.

But has anybody *wanted* changes to Expect (I'm assuming it's related the Tcl tool here)? Are there pending developments that have been merged waiting on a release? If there's nothing to update except the `use` statement…isn't not having to change that exactly what the statement is *for*?

Steady maintenance

Posted Jun 12, 2024 17:38 UTC (Wed) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link]

Yes, I'm happily using expect every day, as far as I'm concerned it can stay the way it is forever.

Also my oldest graphical program in frequent use is written is Tcl/Tk.

Having things just work is very valuable.

Steady maintenance

Posted Jun 13, 2024 17:40 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

I used to keep up with Perl stuff around the [5.10 .. 5.16] timeframe. Seems like every new release I look at nowadays has something surprising in it. They have built-in class syntax now? They have built-in trim()?? (and it's properly unicode-aware too?)

And the thing is, that's where the surprises end. If I fire up some of my old code from 2014 or whenever it was, it'll probably just work here. I cannot say that about nearly any other language in the mainstream; I've been dealing with constant fallout from GCC and Python all month and those aren't even things I *write*, just use.