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From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: the version problem
Message-ID: <498:Feb1204:50:5691@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 12 Feb 91 04:50:56 GMT
References: <1991Feb11.022847.14573@convex.com> <20326:Feb1103:33:0491@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <1991Feb11.204619.16651@convex.com>
Organization: IR
Lines: 19

In article <1991Feb11.204619.16651@convex.com> tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:
> I originally considered writing a tool that would analyze a perl program
> and tell you try to figure out the earliest release it could run on.  I
> think that's what Dan would like.

Yep. I realize the problem is hard---it's just as hard for me to figure
out whether my latest sendmail patches will work on a release earlier
than 5.61, for example. But Perl is a restricted environment. There's no
reason that it couldn't take a -Z flag to output the patch level used by
each feature in a script; provided that you don't hide too much behind
an eval, you could figure out the required version without trouble.

> Dan, you seem to want more -- do you think an analysis
> program as I mentioned above would suit you, even if it didn't test
> for bug conditions since fixed?

It would certainly help.

---Dan