Hi enrgyxprt,
That "something" is kind of important, since the first release of v5.something was in 1994 and v5.24 was released last year :-)
In general, newer versions are of course better than older ones - there have been features added, security holes fixes, speed improvements made, etc. However, there have been some deprecations, so if the jump from "something" to the latest version is large and you experience problems because of this under v5.24, you may end up having to step through the major releases (v5.12, v5.14, v5.18, etc.) and test your script under each. The reason is that quite a few features went through deprecation cycles where Perl would first warn that a feature was deprecated, and the feature wasn't actually removed until a later version. However, it's also very possible that you're not using any of these deprecated features and that your script will work just fine under the latest version, so I'd recommend you try it out.
Update: See also the replies in this thread (from which I copied a sentence from my reply ;-)), and perlhist and the perldeltas for changes in each release of Perl.
Hope this helps,
-- Hauke D
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Because I'm concerned about backward compatibility, I literally have 11 different directories including old ActiveState perl builds. I would suggest renaming your old, existing Perl directory to Perl-5.something, so that you don't lose anything if you need to do regression testing or if PPM drops support for a module.
#11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?' Then have the computer do it the same way.
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I have encountered a minor downside. Occasionally ActiveState removes modules from PPM. The one time I needed one of those modules, another monk was able to give me directions to get a compatible copy.
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ActiveState also ships with cpan, build tools are available via ppm, so there's nothing to stop you building modules direct from source. I prefer to use Strawberry Perl when I have to work on windows, since it comes with a sensible set of modules on top of core, and the development environment is complete, no need to download anything else.
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You may also want to look at the license for Active State. A while back, they switched to a license whereby there were restrictions for use in a business environment (outside of R&D?). My experience with Active State has always been good, and their distribution had very good guidance with it. But I switched to Strawberry Perl, which is even more of an open source.
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