And how is that relevant to this thread? The majority of posts show a gross lack of knowledge when it comes to how enterprises work, etc. -- aka a huge disconnect. And enterprises are not going to change, so if there is any interest in helping those of us that do work in those environments, it needs be directed/focused elsewhere. Encouraging Red Hat, Novel, etc. to ship with a second, newer version is one approach that may work. If there was a semi-official Perl distro that contained lots of additional modules that all of the vendors could make use of that would be even better.

But the reality is that sysadmins in the enterprise are second class citizens of the Perl community. And with responses from people like you that could help nudge things in the right direction but instead discourage it, there's no reason to expect that to change anytime soon. I know your time is limited, but next time could you consider using that time to help raise awareness of the situation instead? If more people talk about it, then maybe eventually the Perl Community will get to the point where it can ask "Why are these vendors shipping much old versions, causing many of our brethren to suffer needlessly, and causing some developers to support older versions of Perl longer? Is there something we can do to help change things?"