On 23/01/12 15:36, TIDWELL, GARY wrote:
Thanks for the quick response.
Sounds like you've answered my question, but I will go ahead and
explain my situation.
We are using the old versions because we never had an issue or moved
to a version of Perl or Oracle that needed us to change. If we did
we would have upgraded at that time.
Yes, quite a few people I know end up doing this but in the long run it can be
a mistake. It is often easier (less work) to stay reasonably current than to
have to leap loads of versions at once. In the corporate world where everything
has to justified and risk assessed it can become hard to move.
What has happened is corporate standards have changed - we have to
have an exception to use DBD/DBI (which makes no sense to me because
both Perl and Oracle are standard within the company). The need for
an exception has been true for years, but this year they want some
proof of community support. We are now moving to current versions
because of this, but if we can't show proof of support we will have a
gap until we can schedule & test the upgrade.
I'm not sure how you are going to get "proof of support" depending on what that
"proof" might be like. Even if you were on the most recent versions the only indication
of any support is that rts are posted (rt.cpan.org) and some get fixed but I think whoever manages
your corporate standards would probably explode if he saw the DBD::Oracle rt queue right now (there
are 40 outstanding issues and some go back 5 years).
Basically everything is still working great& I anticipate no
problems between now and the move to current versions, but corporate
policies are making waves.
And yes, they really should be paying for support, but that decision
is made by people well above me.
There is more than one way to "pay". My job requires using DBD::Oracle and the
things I work on would just stop if DBD::Oracle broke. As a result we have a vested
interest in DBD::Oracle and I work on DBD::Oracle in part to ensure it does not break.
We always test our system with new releases of DBI and DBD::Oracle even if we don't
upgrade to them immediately to ensure when we do there are no nasty surprises.
I'm not sure where you would go for DBI/DBD::Oracle paid support anyway.
Thanks, Gary
Martin
--
Martin J. Evans
Easysoft Limited
http://www.easysoft.com
-----Original Message----- From: Martin J. Evans
[mailto:martin.ev...@easysoft.com] Sent: Monday, January 23, 2012
9:14 AM To: dbi-users@perl.org Subject: Re: What is the oldest
community supported versions for PERL DBI and DBD::ORACLE?
On 23/01/12 14:13, TIDWELL, GARY wrote:
Hi all, we are currently using DBD::ORACLE 1.16 and DBI 1.46, and
I'm having a tough time trying to determine if either of these are
still supported by the open source community.
All help is appreciated.
Thanks, Gary
DBI 1.46 isn't even on cpan now - it has been moved to backpan. It
was released 16 Nov 2004 and has been superseded by 19 releases on
CPAN.
DBD::Oracle 1.16 was released 22 Oct 2004 and has been superseded by
23 releases.
So you are using 7 year code both of which has moved on a lot since
then.
I help out with both of those modules and if you had a problem with
either of them that old my response would likely be to upgrade.
However, it depends on what you mean by "support" - what do you
mean?
Presumably because you are using really old perl modules either a)
the code was written ages ago or b) you need to use a really old
version of Perl newer DBI and DBD::Oracle modules no longer support?
If it is (a) then so long as you don't change anything why would you
need support? If it is (b) and you seriously cannot move to a newer
Perl you've got the same problem with Perl itself.
With DBD::Oracle, the latest version is so different from the one you
are using (code-wise) I doubt even if you found a bug which was still
present in the newest release you'd persuade anyone to also fix it in
1.16.
Perhaps you need to explain why you've asked the question.
Martin
