On Wed, 8 Jun 2005, John Delacour wrote:
> Why does not Apple update Perl through sofware update?
As I understand it, the rationale is that a lot of things depend on the
release of Perl that shipped with the system -- installers, startup
scripts, periodic daemons, etc.
If Perl were to be upgraded, then all the things that depend on it would
need additional rounds of QA testing with each release, but they don't
have the resources to support this.
Let's say, as a plausible example, that the iTunes installer uses Perl
for initial setup. As it is now, any iTunes update on Panther needs to
be tested with Perl 5.8.1, and any update on Tiger needs to be tested
against 5.8.6; all other releases can be ignored. If Apple were to
release revisions to Perl as they come out, then they'd have to start
testing each Panther version against all Perls 5.8.>1, and all Tiger
versions would have to be tested aginst 5.8.>6. (And that's not even
mentioning Jaguar, which might [?] still get iTunes updates, so that
would be all Perls from 5.6.1 and up.)
Clearly, things start multiplying fast.
And every combination in the matrix of release versions would have to be
tested, as different people will have different system update levels,
some will have skipped some packages, etc.
So, while I do wish that they made it simpler to put a newer version of
Perl somewhere like /usr/local, I can sympathize with the rationale for
not tampering with the version that ships as standard with each major
iteration of the system.
--
Chris Devers
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