Perl 5.6.0 was released more than 2 years ago. Perl 5.6.1, its first and only maintainance release was more than a year later (and more than a year ago). Perl 5.8.0 will be here soon, but hasn't yet arrived yet.

Releases of open source software isn't always as speedy as we like to claim it is.

Open Source has the luxury of releasing when it's ready, or at least readier than much commercial software. My experience with Open Source is mostly the Perl and Apache. With those, I haven't seen the need for frequent releases.

I've managed projects in the past that mixed Open Source software with commercial software, including a project that had 100KLOC of Perl. We built 5.6, and then 5.6.1 ourselves, from source. In the year and a half I was with that project, we had no problems with Perl that we couldn't solve easily ourselves, and no problems with Apache that required going out of house for support. It just worked. I can't say the same for IIS, or various incarnations of Microsoft database access libraries. It takes them lots of releases to shake bugs out.

I've been in many situations that required throwing "incident support" money at vendors within days of installing their products. We reported bugs to Microsoft that took months to fix, if that (the one that corrupted NT filesystems did get fairly prompt attention).

In reply to Re: Re: Enterprise Perl? by dws
in thread Enterprise Perl? by meetraz

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