Perl 5.28 was just released, the change log is https://perldoc.pl/perldelta

I would love to see this in Slackware 15, but it was also just released. Other than downloading, compiling, and testing a few things, is there something I can test or do to help it into current?

I would suggest checking out the sticky threads at the top of the forum.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...-a-4175620463/

I'll be doing some tests myself.

If you want to do a little, you can pick some packages from http://cpan.simcop2387.info/test.html and see if they pass their unit tests on -current. Modules flagged red might fail tests for reasons unrelated to Slackware.

For instance: "# cpan Data::Babel" <-- will download and install Data::Babel from CPAN and all of the modules it depends on and run its unit tests.

If you want to do a lot, you can join the CPAN-testers effort and add your own -current system to the pool of test platforms. This will use your system to test all new CPAN modules as they are submitted, and provide feedback to the module authors.

https://metacpan.org/pod/CPAN::Testers

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It's already in current by the way.

Circling back to this. I have a CPAN test harness running on a dedicated slackware64-current testing system, testing/installing 37372 perl modules from CPAN and categorizing/logging failure modes (to distinguish things like unit test failure from missing external dependencies). At the rate it's going it should be through them all in a few weeks.

In the meantime I'll whack together some additional categorization logic to detect which failures might be specific to Slackware or to perl-5.28, and look more closely at those.

Ultimately I'd want to write Slackbuilds to apply patches for relevant modules, but will likely hold off on those until at least RC1, in case -current upgrades perl again (warranting re-testing).

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So far the only severe problems have been with Math::Pari and Mojolicious. Both have been worked around by installing existing slackbuilds from sbo -- installing the "pari" package means Math::Pari doesn't need to, which avoids its broken pari tarball downloading code, and installing the "perl-Mojolicious" package seems to satisfy the dependencies of other Mojolicious-using modules.

The Mojolicious bug is pretty dramatic, though. When installed via cpanm(1), the commands.t test hits an infinite recursion somewhere and consumes all memory. When I tried running it from the command line myself, it ran without errors, consuming very little memory. May revisit that, since it might be a platform-specific bug, as CPAN-testers didn't run into it on other linux distributions: http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=Mojolicious+7.88

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My test system just ran afoul of this:

https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=43349

One of the modules the test framework installed (I think CPAN::Index::Author) pulled in ADAMK's bogus CPAN::Index, which rendered cpan(1)/cpanm(1) inoperable.

I'm re-installing core CPAN::Index, yanking CPAN::Index::* from the list of modules to test, trimming the framework's list of "failed" modules and restarting the framework so it re-tests the ones that "failed" from this.

I'm going to call this little experiment done. I've found a vast diversity of flaws within CPAN modules' makefiles, but little if any of it is specific to perl-v5.28.0.

I need to improve the test harness so it jfw and doesn't need constant monitoring and manual intervention, and might re-run the tests then, but more likely to put it off at least until Slackware updates perl again.

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