To be honest, is there really a need to worry about this? Do you have active users who are not upgrading perl to 5.6 or 5.8, but are upgrading your module?

You're missing out not just on important safety for yourself as you develop, you're also missing out on some handy syntactical sugar (our, lexical filehandles, POSIX character classes in regexes, better utf8 support, etc.). I would suggest polling your existing community, if any, to see what their perl levels are, and see if there would really be any concern with just moving up to 2001 (perl 5.6.1) or, better, 2003 (perl 5.8.1). You may be giving yourself headaches for no reason.

Update: Added italics. I'm not proposing that organisations change perls with each minor release. However, perl 5.6 is already antiquated by computing standards. That's about the time that Java 1.3 was out - as far as I'm aware, not only is it not supported anymore, but most people seem to have moved on to Java 1.4 already (which is probably newer than Perl 5.8.0). Why does perl get special treatment here?

In reply to Re: Backward compatible lexical warnings by Tanktalus
in thread Backward compatible lexical warnings by xdg

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