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I'm using Cygwin 2.769. I used setup.exe to upgrade Perl to version 5.14.1-2, which works fine. But now whenever I open setup.exe to upgrade/install some other package, it by default wants to downgrade Perl back to 5.10.1-5. If I don't remember to manually cycle that box over to my current version each time, Perl gets downgraded without my noticing.

Is this expected behavior, or have I hosed something up? It seems like using the "Curr" setting should not by default downgrade things.

Ken Williams
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  • You'll likely get a quicker answer on the [Cygwin list](http://cygwin.com/lists.html#cygwin) – Jim Garrison Feb 28 '12 at 23:32
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    I just ran `setup.exe` myself. The current version of Perl for Cygwin is 5.10.1-5. How did you upgrade to 5.14.1-2? – Keith Thompson Feb 28 '12 at 23:50
  • There are two votes to migrate this to serverfault; wouldn't superuser make more sense? – Keith Thompson Feb 28 '12 at 23:52
  • You're probably right - I haven't used either of those communities much but perhaps that's a better fit. – Ken Williams Feb 29 '12 at 04:13
  • I'm not at my work computer now, but I'm certain all I did to get the newer perl was click the version number until 5.14 showed up. – Ken Williams Feb 29 '12 at 04:13
  • @Keith - and also that I didn't naturally think of "server" or "super" when thinking of my Windows box. =) Anyway, I've now voted to migrate it too. – Ken Williams Feb 29 '12 at 04:28
  • @KenWilliams: I was *sure* I had just tried that and it didn't work, but now it does. – Keith Thompson Feb 29 '12 at 05:11
  • Wait, was this migrated, or just killed? I've never been through this process before. – Ken Williams Feb 29 '12 at 15:46
  • This was just killed. Which, personally, seems odd: even if it's a better fit on one of the other sites, I don't think it's so horrendously off-topic to just die. In any case, as @Jim said, I suspect you'll have better luck with this one on the Cygwin mailing list. – me_and Feb 29 '12 at 18:52
  • He's probably right, but I'm growing tired of signing up for mailing lists, even in lurker mode, just to ask a question. I'm probably on a couple dozen such mailing lists right now, and I need to stop. – Ken Williams Feb 29 '12 at 21:47

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I've had this problem, and it's made package managers almost unbearable. When disparate packages want to rely on different versions of a package that can only install in one version at a time, bad things happen.

Don't use the system perl for anything. Install a perl that other packages don't care about.

brian d foy
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