The Lyon Amendment to the Lancaster Consensus

Minimum-support Perl

Going forward, the Perl toolchain will target Perl 5.8.1, released September 2003. This will allow toolchain modules to reliably use PerlIO and improved Unicode support.

Because of the many Unicode bug-fixes in early 5.8 releases, toolchain maintainers reserve the right to later bump the minimum to 5.8.4 (which ships with Solaris 10).

We have revised this to:

No new release of a distribution in the Perl toolchain will specify a minimum perl prerequisite version (whether configure, build, runtime, or test) that has been available for less than ten years.

As a special one-time exception, the minimum perl requirement on these distributions will not move past v5.16.0 until July 2024, when Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS v7 leave their maintenance support phase, even though v5.16.0 was released more than 10 years ago today.

The toolchain is generally understood, here, to include:

CPAN
CPAN-Meta
ExtUtils-CBuilder
ExtUtils-MakeMaker
Module-Build
Module-Metadata
Test-Harness
Test-Simple
version

...and their prerequisites.

Document created on 2023-04-27 14:01:38 +0200 by Ricardo Signes. Document last modified on 2023-05-11 08:25:08 -0400 by Ricardo Signes.