Often on PerlMonks I see posts, asking for some help, with a requirement for perl minimum version (i.e. "perl 5.8.8+" or "perl 5.10+", or "any perl above 5.8" etc).

What surprise me is that people still trying to advice to "upgrade perl" again and again. Why??

Advice to upgrade perl comes from wrong assumption that:

There is only one instance where this code supposed to work.

That's often not true.

Cases where there is only one instance where code should work:

1) You are the only user of your own code. You hack it for yourself.

2) It's a webdevelopment and there is just single instance of web application (I am not talking about single server vs cluster, I am talking about case when you develop one site somesite.com, but not a web framework, not a software-as-service to be installed on your clients machines)

Cases when there are many instances of your code (i.e. when your code have users):

1) You are developing CPAN distribution

2) You are developing standalone application

And it's not an option to ask your users to upgrade perl.

Imaging that all the software that you use (say, under Linux) suddenly change install instruction and and ask you to install "rvm", "virtualenv", "perlbrew", upgrade Glib and GCC, and install certain versions of Python, Ruby and Perl into virtual environments.

If no one would be allowed to run system, vendor, perl, perl would be already dead.

And yes, about "unsupported" perl versions. Most verndor perl versions are unsupported (well, they supposed to be supported by vendors)

Conclusion: Please, don't suggest to upgrade perl if you see that there are clear requirements about *range* of perl versions in the post.

In reply to Stop suggesting to upgrade perl by vsespb

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.