It's that time again! Time when I hammer the last few nails in the coffin of a version of Perl.
By which I mean, the next major release of Test::More (aka Test::Builder1.5) will support 5.8.1 and up. ExtUtils::MakeMaker will probably go that way, too. This effectively cuts off most of CPAN from 5.8.0 and down. This will happen in the next few months. Test::More might nudge its requirement a little higher depending on just how difficult it is to work around early threading bugs in the earlier 5.8 releases. At this point I don't imagine this will cause too much disruption. There aren't many serious 5.6 users left and whomever is left has to have already come up with some sort of 5.6PAN solution. Dropping 5.6 will ease maintenance and testing of these modules and make a greater baseline of core modules available. However, if a company or organization would like to see 5.6 compatibility retained, they can contact me about sponsoring the extra work for continued maintenance. Thanks to Sarathy and rgs for some great and long lived releases! It's been a good eight years. Schwern Slayer of Pseudo-Hashes Defender of Lexical Encapsulation Destroyer of Perl Versions
