more historical versions?

It would be very handy to have more versions of perl available for testing on legacy perls. What do you think about making that part of the official repo vs having it rolled somewhere else?

[zakame]

👍

FWIW I maintain a fork of this with 5.14.2 (primarily for my $WORK needs): https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/zakame/perl/

[tianon]

Are the older versions still supported upstream? (security backports, etc)

No. The latest two Perls are generally supported. The one older than that is supported for security backports only. Currently, that's 5.20.x and 5.18.x supported, with 5.16.x getting security fixes only.

In a few months, when 5.22 ships, then it will be 5.22.x and 5.20.x supported and 5.18.x getting security fixes only.

Nonetheless, people still run vastly older versions and I'd like to have them available for testing CPAN modules on a clean build of antique Perls. But if making them "official" mis-sets support expectations, then I can always publish them privately.

[yosifkit]

It's up to @PeterMartini, but it would be fine on my end to do a PR to "add old releases" to the official-images repo then do another PR to remove them once they are pushed to the hub. The images would stay there "unsupported" and not be updated with any base image changes, but they would be available for people to use.

[zakame]

Might be a bit extra burden for the maintainer. I considered that initially, but opted to just fork and maintain the version I use by myself.

[PeterMartini]

@dagolden How far back do you think we should go?

@PeterMartini for me, personally, I'd love every non-dev release from 5.8.1 onwards, but that's because I do some wacky toolchain stuff where testing on stock 5.x.y for arbitrary x.y is actually interesting.

But for the general public, I could imagine having every latest point release from 5.8 on onwards could be of interest. E.g. 5.8.9, 5.10.1, 5.12.5, etc.

[PeterMartini]

@zakame - it looks like your fork changed to use wheezy, is that a requirement or was that just to get it to build?

[zakame]

@PeterMartini yep, jessie doesn't build 5.14.2 now due to the newer gcc, etc. and I have not much time to investigate further.

[zakame]

Just for the record, I re-run my build with jessie and here's my problem:

# Failed at ../lib/h2ph.t line 49
#      got 'Illegal declaration of subroutine main::__has_include at _h2ph_pre.ph line 488.
# '
# expected /(?^:syntax OK$)/
# Failed at ../lib/h2ph.t line 56
#      got "Illegal character in prototype for main::__has_include : STR at _h2ph_pre.ph line 488.\nCompilation failed in require at lib/h2ph.pht line 1.\nCompilation failed in require at -e line 1.\n"
# expected ""
../lib/h2ph.t .....................................................
Failed 2/6 subtests

[PeterMartini]

Sorry this is taking so long.

For 5.16, I've found that the Configure specific commit 6f87f404fa51739971a4068da1f11443024f3fc4 from later Perl versions applies cleanly and allows 5.16 to finish building with no other changes.

I've also been tripped up by dist/IO/t/io_unix.t failing in 5.16.x, and maybe even the versions that are still actively supported, if TEST_JOBS is too high. Single test instance always passes, but it fails increasingly often as I bump the number (and its worth noting that because those jobs are IO bound, I can see speed gains much higher than $(nprocs)).

I've gotten back to 5.12 working just with that Configure patch, and am almost done with 5.10 now - I had to cherry pick a patch for hints/linux.sh, 40f026236b9959b7ad3260fedc6c66cd30bb7abc, so that Configure could find the libraries and build properly, and I'm still getting a small number of test failures that will take a little more time to debug.

Once that's done, I'm hoping 5.8.9 is straightforward.

[PeterMartini]

'master' here currently builds back to 5.12, and the versions that have patches also have patchlevel.h patched to include references to the changes necessary to get them to build.

[PeterMartini]

@zakame - I'm not sure if you saw my last two updates, but I've got 5.14.4 in this repo building cleanly on the same base as 5.20, I just had to cherry pick a Configure patch to do so. Does that suit your needs?

Are you hand patching? What about using Devel::Patchperl?