Subject: bug#66050: Making perl-mode.el obsolete

From: Richard Stallman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2023 14:34:50 -0400

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Many years ago, I thought it would be an improvement on general
principles to have only one Perl mode.  I do not know Perl so I have
no opinion about either one.

Of course, I first asked what Perl users thought of this.  I found
that many preferred CPerl mode and many preferred Perl mode.  And the
ones who preferred each one were very attached to it, and did not want
to switch.

That may have changed, or maybe not.  I think we had better ask the
users now what they feel.  If there are still many users who strongly
prefer Perl mode, even if they are only 10% as many as strongly prefer
CPerl mode, we definitely should not mark Perl mode obsolete.

If it is feasible to put conditionals in CPerl mode to make it behave
like Perl mode -- or close enough that almost everyone is happy with
it -- maybe then we could obsolete the current Perl mode.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)