You won't be leaving them behind. They still have DBI-1.xx
FWIW as per customer request, I am depending on 5.8.4 and up since two weeks. You can imagine that's a little bit earlier than I planned. And it's not UTF-8 that makes me need 5.8.4
That's largely what I was getting at.
Besides Unicode, 5.8.x is a lot more thoroughly tested and bug free, plus thread support is a lot more mature, plus there's PerlIO to work with, plus various other advantages.
And, there is a different and/or newer set of modules included with it. (Forgive my ignorance, but starting with which version of Perl was Test::More bundled?)
The fact is, if not now, then before too long, 5.6.x will be the new 5.005 as far as the general developer community is concerned.
Perhaps as a middle ground, I can suggest that DBI v2 will support Perl 5.6 initially, but that support will be considered deprecated. This way, 5.6 people can move to DBI v2 to get some of the new features, but with the fore-knowledge that they should upgrade to 5.8 before too long afterwards.
That would be a "gentle forced migration" if you will.
And they still have the older DBI versions to use in perpetuity, regardless.
One last thing: Have any surveys been done concerning what "for production" versions of Perl are being used by what fraction of users, both in general and those that also use DBI? For example, how many have migrated to 5.8 already? How many others are on 5.6? And how many others are on older versions of 5? Or, heavens forbid, 4.x or older? Where can I lookup such info, *other* than on Google?
-- Darren Duncan
