Test dist/ modules against older perls

[tonycoz]

Add testing dist/ modules against older perls.

This currently uses the perldocker/perl-testers images rather than the official perl images since perl-testers includes the older versions, while the official perl images don't.

Unfortunately perl-testers doesn't include threaded perls, but it's an improvement over no testing at all.

I currently only test against a small subset of perls, but this is easily changed.

[Leont]

This is a good idea

[jkeenan]

Is the new program written in such a way that it could be called in environments other than GH continuous integration (assuming appropriate older perl executables and libraries were present)?

[khwilliamson]

On 8/9/22 18:14, Tony Cook wrote:

Add testing dist/ modules against older perls.

This currently uses the perldocker/perl-testers images rather than the official perl images since perl-testers includes the older versions, while the official perl images don't.

Unfortunately perl-testers doesn't include threaded perls, but it's an improvement over no testing at all.

I currently only test against a small subset of perls, but this is easily changed.

Thanks to @pali, Devel::PPPort is tested back to 5.6 something in CI. I b elieve it includes threaded.

[tonycoz]

Is the new program written in such a way that it could be called in environments other than GH continuous integration (assuming appropriate older perl executables and libraries were present)?

I think so.

It doesn't try to install dependencies so they would need to be installed first. I know at least one module depends on parent which isn't a dist/ module, but that's already installed in the perl-testers images.

[bram-perl]

For the " XSLoader.t: fix local skip() implementation" commit: can you specify in the commit message what was wrong and what it fixed? (Looking at the code I do see what's wrong/what it fixed but I like that information to be in the commit message so that looking at the code isn't required)

[tonycoz]

For the " XSLoader.t: fix local skip() implementation" commit: can you specify in the commit message what was wrong and what it fixed?

I've updated the commit message for that commit and for the test dist/ modules against various older perls in CI commit.