Re: [ANNOUNCE] Git v2.17.0-rc0

[Junio C Hamano]

Ãvar ArnfjÃrà Bjarmason <avarab@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On Fri, Mar 16 2018, Junio C. Hamano jotted:
>
>>       gitweb: hard-depend on the Digest::MD5 5.8 module
>
> I've just noticed this now, but while this module is in 5.8 RedHat's
> butchered perl doesn't have it in the base system, thus this introduces
> the do-we-even-care regression that git's full test suite won't pass on
> a RedHat (or CentOS) base system, because the gitweb tests will fail to
> "use" Digest::MD5.
>
> I'm slightly leaning towards not caring about it, since there's no other
> perl distributor that does this sort of split-out of the core, and if
> you're on a RedHat system they're solving your package problems, so this
> really only impacts the edge case of git developers and redhat
> packagers, both of whom can just do "yum install -y perl-Digest-MD5" to
> fix it.

Thanks for noting.  I agree that this is not something that requires
more than a mention near the beginning of release notes.

I haven't wordsmithed it fully, but it should say something along
the lines of ...

 Documentation/RelNotes/2.16.0.txt | 10 ++++++++++
 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+)

diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/2.16.0.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.16.0.txt
index 8f0461eefd..8b4c24200b 100644
--- a/Documentation/RelNotes/2.16.0.txt
+++ b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.16.0.txt
@@ -6,6 +6,16 @@ Backward compatibility notes and other notable changes.
  * Use of an empty string as a pathspec element that is used for
    'everything matches' is now an error.
 
+ * Part of Git that depends on Perl have required at least Perl 5.8
+   since Git v1.7.4 released in 2010, but we used to assume some core
+   modules from Perl distribution may not exist on the system and did
+   a conditional "eval { require <<module>> }"; we no longer do this.
+   On a platform that ships a stripped-down Perl by default, the user
+   may have to install modules the platform chooses not to ship as
+   part of its core (e.g. Digest::MD5, File::Temp, File::Spec,
+   Net::SMTP, NET::Domain).  RedHat/CentOS excludes Digest::MD5 from
+   its base installation, for example.
+
 
 Updates since v2.15
 -------------------