Requiring v5.12 breaks URI and LWP on v5.10 and earlier

[briandfoy]

Requiring v5.12, which looks like it only replaces the use strict line, now breaks URI (libwww-perl/URI#166), which has a minimum versions of v5.8. This means the tests won't pass on v5.8 or v5.10. And LWP, which advertises a minimum perl version of v5.8, depends on URI.

My preference would be for URI to not use Test::Fatal, but beyond that I think this sort of change could use some coordination with stakeholders so they can decide before the builds break.

[rjbs]

I can talk to maints on LWP about this. If they just want a couple weeks of rollback to change testing, can do.

Unsurprisingly, my take is that if someone is still running a 15+ year old version of perl and can't upgrade, they are bound to have an increasing number of libraries begin to move past their perl.

[briandfoy]

If LWP is going to depend on modules that have higher minimum Perl versions than what it declares now, it needs to bump up its minimum version so cpan or cpanm can install it without failures. This is the second module (libwww-perl/HTML-Tagset#14) to make a minimum version change that it didn't really need to do. Had it not affected something as common as LWP, it wouldn't matter.

People who want to run earlier versions will be able to do that, with some work, but if the current LWP cannot run on v5.8 or v5.10 because of prerequisites, it needs to tell people that.

[rjbs]

If LWP is going to depend on modules that have higher minimum Perl versions than what it declares now, it needs to bump up its minimum version […]

I think that's totally reasonable. I have a tool that helps with this, and should probably run it against my libraries and see if I've missed any cases where a version bump is being forced…