v5.04 vs 5.6.n versions of perl

mandog has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

An non profit organization I'm working with is considering a web hosting company that offers perl 5.04 and CGI 2.4.9. They are also considering using the box that the university lets me administer for non-profit use. My box is running Perl 5.6.1

A few months ago, I moved to 5.6.1 because the scripts I wrote in ActiveState puked on Debian potato / perl 5.04. I did stuff like use our instead of my and use warnings instead of /usr/bin/perl -w I've read through the perldelta docs and there doesn't seem like working in two versions of perl would hurt too badly. I'm smarter than I was a few months ago :->

Am I missing something?

btw, my feelings aren't hurt at the prospect of rejection. I offer some nice stuff, but my deal depends entirely on me and my handshake with some folks in the University. If I get hit by a beer truck, my co-workers can probably help people move to another setup, but things will be a little tense.

email: mandog

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Re: v5.04 vs 5.6.n versions of perl by tstock (Curate) on Oct 31, 2001 at 12:28 UTC
I don't see where developing under 5.6 to deploy on servers with older versions of Perl is a problem, that's what I've been doing anyway. A few points to consider: make test scripts or test harnesses for your applications study the perldelta's to death check and document module versions use version control Good luck. This is not a perfect world but we have the technology :) Tiago	[reply]
Re: v5.04 vs 5.6.n versions of perl by kwoff (Friar) on Nov 01, 2001 at 06:18 UTC
I work in this scenario (until three weeks when finally we move from Solaris to Linux, yay!), where the dev box is 5.6.0 while the old live server is 5.004. It's not so bad, I guess, because you're aware of it. I personally was bitten by using 'mkdir' with only one argument and doing things like 'print for @daddy'. But it seems you're developing new code, so if you already have those things in mind and try to keep to the lowest common denominator.	[reply]