Re: [groff] 15/39: [grog]: Drop relic code and comments.

[John Gardner]

>
> Perl 5.6.1 is incredibly old (April 2001).  I cannot find any evidence of
> any current distribution supporting it.


IIRC, declaring a program version is recommended practice, as future
versions of Perl may have different defaults w.r.t opt-in behaviours like `use
warnings` and `use strict`. The `use v5.6.1;` directive instructs Perl to
assume the defaults for that particular version, ensuring no accidental
breakage.


On Mon, 31 Oct 2022 at 15:42, Dave Kemper <saint.snit@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 10/30/22, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> > They'll be told at configure time, because we have an Autoconf test for
> > it.
>
> Reasonable.
>
> > Furthermore, I've rewritten grog nearly completely since Bernd last
> > touched it.  I don't have any idea what Perl 5.6(.1) features Bernd had
> > in mind when he added that statement.
>
> Also reasonable.  I knew grog had been largely rewritten, but didn't
> scrutinize the history closely enough to realize that line was an
> artifact from its old life.
>
> > Perl 5.6.1 is incredibly old (April 2001).  I
> > cannot find any evidence of any current distribution supporting it.
>
> I'm less convinced by this -- unless a difficult roadblock stands in
> the way, I think modern groff ought to work or fail gracefully on an
> obsolete platform -- but the prior two points are convincing enough on
> their own.
>
> > I'd prefer to audit the script as you describe than to restore this
> > arcane feature to it; I had to find out about it the hard way.
>
> Makes sense.  I thought this audit might be onerous, but your patch in
> the followup email doesn't change many lines (and followed pretty
> quickly on the heels of this email).  It looks good to me!
>
>