Perl smartmatch : what now ?

Sorry to wake up an old discussion, but ... does anybody have a clear idea of what is going to happen to smartmatch ?

Our team maintains dozens of internal applications and modules containing "given/when" and smartmatch statements. Most of this code was written between 2007 and 2012 -- remember, at that time smartmatch was an official feature, never mentioned as being "experimental", so we happily used it in many places. The reasons for using smartmatch were quite modest :

• match a scalar against an array
• match 2 scalars, without a warning when one of the scalars is undef
• more readable switch statements, thanks to "given/when"

 When 5.18 came out, I was quite worried about the regression of smartmatch to  "experimental" status, but I was confident that things would be settled in 5.20, so I decided not to upgrade (we still use 5.14). Now 5.20 is out .. and nothing has changed about smartmatch, without even a clue about how this is going to evolve.

Our servers cannot easily upgrade to 5.20, because this would throw warnings all over the place. I tried to find a way to globally turn off these warnings (like set PERL5OPT=-M-warnings=experimental::smartmatch, or  PERL5OPT=-M=experimental::smartmatch), but this doesn't work because the "no warnings" pragma is lexically scoped, so global settings are not taken into account.

So my options are :

1. don't change anything, don't upgrade, and wait for 5.22, hoping that some reasonable form of smartmatch will be reintroduced into the core
2. revise all source files, adding a line "use experimental qw/smartmatch/;" at the beginning of each lexical scope ... but I have no guarantee that this will still work in future versions
3. revise all source files, removing the given/when/smartmatch statements and replacing them with plain old Perl, or with features from some CPAN modules like match::smart or Smart::Match ... but it would be a pity to engage in such work if regular smartmatch comes back in a future version of Perl.

As you can see, none of these options is really satisfactory, so I would be interested in hearing if other companies are in the same situation and how they decided to handle it.

By the way, I love the new Perl way of introducing new features as "experimental", until they become stable and official ... but this only works well when the experimental status is declared from the start. The problem with smartmatch is that it had been official for several years, before being retrograted to experimental. Agreed, the full semantics of smartmatch as published in 10.0 had inconsistencies, but throwing away the whole thing is a bit too harsh -- I'm sure that many users like me would be happy with a reasonable subset of rules for matching common cases.
  

Thanks in advance, Laurent Dami