[Perlunit-devel] Using Test::Unit on old versions of Perl, Re: Getting up and Running

[Matthew A. <mc...@us...>]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 05:15:55PM -0400, mah...@va... wrote:

> Thanks for the reply.  As far as the version of PERL I am using here
> is the info: 5.005_03.  Also I am running the current version of
> PerlUnit: v0.24.

Sorry about the long delay.  I went off on holiday and then got sucked
into work when I got back.

Running Test::Unit under this old version of Perl is the cause of the
problem, I think you need 5.6.0 or newer.  I've put on my doc/TODO
that the minimum perl version should be checked because the error
messages you got are really too obscure to know what's going on.


Possible solutions are

 a) upgrade your Perl

I know that some places are stuck to old Perl interpreters for one
reason or another, so although this is the preferred option it isn't
always possible.

 b) use an old version of Perlunit that works with old versions of
 Perl, and deal with the old bugs

Just by memory, I would guess you may need something before version
0.14.  Please let me know if you're going down this road, it may be OK
for a tryout but it's not something I want to force on people.

 c) we could fix the current Perlunit to work with old versions of
 Perl

This will require some work now plus ongoing vigilance against
problems creeping back in at each point.  Looking at POE because it
still supports 5.005_03
  http://search.cpan.org/src/RCAPUTO/POE-0.3202/README

I see the CPAN testers haven't checked this in a while,
  http://testers.cpan.org/show/POE.html

I haven't dipped back into the mail archive to see what was going on
around the time the new keywords were used.  I expect there was some
discussion.

This project is in an unusual position as far as support for old Perl:
if you have some legacy code, it's entirely reasonable to want to
write a test suite to cover it in its native legacy Perl *before*
moving to a new version.


Please let the list know if you're interested in this.

Matthew  #8-)