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

I'm going to ask what may seem like a silly question to some, but here goes:

Exactly how ready is 5.8.0 for production stable work?

I have been given a project where I am in charge of the entire environment with 2 exceptions 1) my hardware and OS (HP-UX) and 2) the database.

I have, quite obviously, chosen to undertake this project in perl. I will be writing a web-based bug request tracking system in perl that will also be able to interface with vendor and third party support systems.

I was hoping that some other monks might have some advice. Thank you all in advance,

Jeremiah

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: 5.8.0 and 5.6.x
by adrianh (Chancellor) on Aug 19, 2002 at 02:54 UTC

    You might find "Does 5.8.0 suck?" of interest.

    Personally, I wouldn't use it for production work yet unless you need some of the new functionality in 5.8

    It seems a darn fine release - but it's not been out in the real world long enough yet to rely on.

    All IMHO of course.

[reply]

      I'd say it differently: If you intend to use the features of 5.6.x, then please take 5.8.0 instead. It has all the fixes of 5.6.1 and lots more. It has unicode support which doesn't suck, no, even rocks.

      If you ever find yourself being bitten by utf-8 related problems in 5.6.x, then don't go searching for workarounds. Install the real thing. 5.8.0

      If you think you need to use threads, then don't take 5.005 or 5.6. But also don't bet the farm on the new ithreads in 5.8.0, because interesting issues keep coming up with them.

      Do experiment with them though. The lack of people who started using threads when 5.8.0 was being developed is one of the reasons why they're not stable yet.

      bart@smop.org

[reply]

        Hmmm.... I'd actually disagree with that advice... in a hopefully constructive manner :-)

        Note: I am not saying "don't use 5.8". I'm happily using 5.8 on my laptop at the moment! It''s fluffy and nice. It's been the most pain-free upgrade of perl ever for me. I have it running on a couple of dev boxes and use it daily.

        However....

        5.8 will also have bugs (maybe less than 5.6.1 :-). At the moment, most of them are unknown and undocumented.

        While perl 5.6.1 has bugs, many (possibly even most) are known and documented.

        When it comes to a production server that people depend on I will pick more-known-bugs over less-unknown-bugs any day of the week --- unless the known-bug in question is a significant barrier to developing/maintaining/running the server in question.

        Hopefully that makes some vague sort of sense.

[reply]
existing bug-tracking wheels
by ChemBoy (Priest) on Aug 19, 2002 at 17:06 UTC

    This is not in direct answer to your question, of course, but I hope you're planning to look at RT ("Request Tracker") and Bugzilla before you undertake to write your own web-based bug request tracking system. They might well not be exactly what you're looking for, but you might be able to adapt one or the other to your needs much more quickly than you could write such a system from scratch.

    Good luck!


    If God had meant us to fly, he would *never* have given us the railroads.
        --Michael Flanders

[reply]

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