Rereading my original post, I guess it does appear whiny. I'm not stuck forever in this job with the perl 5.6.1, as I shall be moving on from the client site at the beginning of March. I'm using 5.8.8 for my home environments.

In terms of a base line perl version when developing CPAN modules, I have been choosing 5.6.1, as it includes our and lexical filehandles. In my CPAN modules, I've not been using any constructs that require 5.8.

I'm glad this thread has provoked discussion on the subject of support for old perl versions. Going forward, I think it would be useful for some guidelines for module authors, encouraging them to think about the following questions:

• What is the minimum perl version you are willing to support?

• What is the minimum perl version the module has been tested against?

• What is the perl version before which the module will definitely break?

With perl 5.10, or indeed perl 6, this topic will be bound to resurface.