Funtoo gets the new Perl

Soon, Dan Robbins will be merging my perl-experimental branch which contains the perl-experimental overlay. This overlay contains a handful of packages, the most important of which is perl-5.10.0 which has been out for about a year now and Gentoo still hasn't put in portage. One nuisance of the perl-experimental overlay is they don't use changelogs which means if you want to know what's going on with a package from this you'll have to check out git log as well as the changelog. I feel this is a minor issue, in the long run we should migrate all package logs to git's internal logging facility.


I've been testing perl-5.10.0 for a week or so now with few problems, and none which I've found to be un-resolvable. It's entirely possible that there are packages I don't use that will break on 5.10. When we merge perl-experimental it will be hardmasked at first, and we're looking for people to test for a couple of weeks before we move it to the testing branch, so we can iron out any problems which we weren't able to account for.

upgrading to perl-5.10

So, in theory, all you have to do is run

perl-cleaner all

after unmasking and emerging dev-lang/perl and sys-devel/libperl. In practice however, I found this didn't work. it seemed to only find packages in world which needed upgrading, so between me and one other person, we came up with this little one liner to fix packages were built against perl-5.8

locate 5.8.8 | grep ^/usr/ | grep -v ^/usr/portage | xargs equery belongs | uniq | sed -e s/^/\=/ | xargs emerge --oneshot

once you've run perl-cleaner and the one-liner, you should be completely upgraded.

Issues specific to perl-5.10 can be reported on the Gentoo bugtracker, in the perl 5.10 bug or to us on #funtoo.