NLnet M3 progress

Code modernization

Actions taken within the NLnet supported MailBox mid-life upgrade, work-package code modernization. Most MailBox code was written between 1999 and 2005, with perl 5.8 (first stable unicode) as backwards compatibility base. Many improvements have been made to Perl since, and some syntax got deprecated.

The new minimum Perl version to run MailBox is 5.16:

• use no newer syntax than 5.16 (released 2012)
• do not use syntax which is deprecated in 5.42 (released 2025)

The following changes have/are being made:

• Generic code practice clean-up (ongoing effort)
• Update minimal Perl version in all modules (completed)
• Remove support for bare file-handles (completed)
• use of s///r (completed)
• use of //, the defined-or (completed)
• optimize regular expressions
• use IO::Layers

oorestyle

An additional step in the code clean-up has been automated in oorestyle (ongoing effort). At the moment, it automates about 40 changes/warnings for suggested improvements.