Living with smart match breakage

[Abigail]

On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 07:26:39PM +1000, Kieren Diment wrote:
> Presumably CPAN testing of a blead perl with smartmatch removed/deprecated could pick that up pretty quickly.  I mean I have under-used experimental cpan modules that have some test failures, but if they suddenly started throwing do not compile errors[1], even I would pick them up.
> 
> [1] Not that I use many of the newer core features, occasionally I have to account for some of my $work code having to work on 5.8.


I've placed the comment "When we move away from 5.8, perhaps replace
this with given/when" several times at $WORK. It took us quite a number
of years to move away from 5.8.5 (and we're still trailing a couple
of releases).

But now, it won't make sense to use given/when, if it may change in
the future. But someone is going to use given/when at some point in
time, putting another hurdle for an upgrade to 5.18 or beyond (whenever
that may be). (If you hire more than a handful of new devs each month,
someone will not have gotten the memo).

Turning on warnings for using a construct more than *five* years after it
was introduced doesn't make Perl win any brownie points for an outsider
(yes, I understand the reasons, and no, I don't have a better solution).



Abigail