On Mon, Jul 04, 2005 at 03:00:14AM -0700, Michael G Schwern wrote: > On Mon, Jul 04, 2005 at 10:36:39AM +0100, Ben Evans wrote: > > I would say that this cascade effect is precisely why you *should* > > drop 5.004 compatability. There's no excuse other than "if it ain't broke, > > don't fix it" for running such an archaic Perl. People should be encouraged > > to move to a more modern environment whenever possible. > > While I'd love it if it worked this way, more often the admins refuse to > upgrade in spite of losing module support and its the programmer who gets > punished. The concern is more about not breaking existing code (whether > warrented or not) than furthering development. > > I just had exactly this happen to a friend of mine contracting at a company > still running 5.5.3. He couldn't even convince them to install a modern > Perl in a separate location and leave the old code running 5.5.3.
As someone whose production code is currently required to run under 5.5.3, I'm very grateful to module authors whose code still runs under that version at least. A number of modules which don't run under 5.5.3 do with simple changes, primarily changing "our" to "use vars" and getting rid of x.y.z version numbers. Unfortunately, upgrading isn't always an option. Anyone can type $ ./Configure -des && make && make test install but putting the results of such a command into a base operating system installation, testing that said operating system functions correctly with hundreds of (often badly written) scripts installing databases and middleware and who-knows-what, and ensuring that thousands of apps running on tens of thousands of machines in dozens of different configurations function at least as well as they did before is a little harder. And whilst I know how to manage all this, sometimes it's hard enough just stopping people from mandating the use of ksh, Java and XML. Having said all that, feel free to do what you want with 5.004 support. I don't care! I have 5.005! -- Paul Johnson - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pjcj.net
