in reply to Stop suggesting to upgrade perl

If your code base now runs on perl 5.8 only, eventually you will have to upgrade. At some point in the future you'll have new hardware on which the legacy OS that come with legacy perl won't boot anymore, so it's not a question whether you upgrade, but when.

With that in mind, advice of the form "Upgrade to at least perl 5.12 because it fixes your $problem" is actually quite valuable, because it gives you reason not delay the upgrade any longer.

Also the more incentive you have to upgrade, the easier it becomes to convince your manager that now would be a good time to spend your resources on upgrading to a newer version of perl. And a list of issues that would be much easier to fix with a newer version of perl is exactly the kind of incentive that convinces managers.

Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed

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Re^2: Stop suggesting to upgrade perl
by vsespb (Chaplain) on Sep 01, 2013 at 14:45 UTC
    The post was about users. I can't ask them to upgrade. Perl 5.8 supported till Y2017 in RHEL5, Perl 5.10 till Y2020. Perl 5.12 is probably not too new. But Perl 5.18 is not shipped with majority of distros currently.
[reply]
      The post was about users.

      Then I don't see your point at all. The vast majority of questions asked on perlmonks is from programmers, not (just) users. The very few questions by users are barely worth discussing.

      Perl 5.8 supported till Y2017 in RHEL5, Perl 5.10 till Y2020

      What does "supported" mean in that context? I guess there will be security updates, right? I don't quite think that Redhat will answer a user's question in 2016 on how to do proper Unicode handling with perl 5.8, will they?

      Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed
[reply]
        The post was about users.
        Then I don't see your point at all. The vast majority of questions asked on perlmonks is from programmers
        See the original post:
        Cases when there are many instances of your code (i.e. when your code have users):
        You are programmer. But your code has users. You cannot suggest to your users to install perl with perlbrew, because you'll lose most of them then.
        What does "supported" mean in that context? I guess there will be security updates, right
        That means there is live, still supported distro with that version of perl, and yes, with security updates for perl and other software.
[reply]
      If you decide to constrain yourself to what Redhat will support, then I suggest that you ask Redhat for help. They're the ones holding you back, not the volunteers here.
[reply]
        I will be asking help here, but only from volunteers, who understand that vendor perls are usable and why, and who wish to help with them.
[reply]

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