Perl less that 5.8.8 required

This bug was tracked down by Sam.

MKDoc does not work correctly distros with Perl 5.8.8 and Encode v2.18 — these cause errors as documented on the Fedora Core 5 page, this problems doesn't happen with older versions of Perl, see the Fedora Core 4 page for an attempt to generate the same error.

Workaround

Prior to a workaround being added to MKDoc code the only way to get around this problem on FC5 (and it might be the same on other distros) is to install a old version of perl in /usr/local/ and use this for MKDoc — it is not possible to install a RPM of an older version of Encode since this generates lots of errors like this:

file /usr/bin/enc2xs from install of perl-Encode-2.17-8 conflicts with file from package perl-5.8.8-5

Description

This is how Sam has described the problem:

It's a bug in the Encode module, which is a core Perl module used to do utf-8 encoding and decoding. Here's the behavior that MKDoc is relying on:

  $ perl -MEncode -MData::Dumper -e 'my $ref = Encode::decode_utf8({ foo =>
  1}); print Dumper($ref);'
  $VAR1 = {
'foo' => 1
};

That shows that Encode::decode_utf8 is passing a reference to a hash through un-mangled. That's what I get on my laptop, running Perl 5.8.6. However, here's what's happening on the machine that exhibits this problem:

$ perl -MEncode -MData::Dumper -e 'my $ref = Encode::decode_utf8({ foo =>
1}); print Dumper($ref);'
$VAR1 = 'HASH(0x9710c28)';

Now Encode::decode_utf8 is turning a hash into a stringified reference, causing the bug in MKDoc. That's Perl 5.8.8.

Sam has raised this at perlmonks see: http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=556003 and in the perl.unicode usenet group: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.unicode/3009 | http://groups.google.com/group/perl.unicode/browse_thread/thread/623802a9a29ca 220