I know several companies where they still heavily use perl 5.6.x or even 5.00x for that matter. (Well, some of them still have perl 4 around, but let's not talk about this). One of the complaints I heard is that looking at CPAN they don't know which module can they use, which one is working on a certain old version of perl.

They explain that in Java if they use a certain version (e.g. 1.4) they know exactly what packages are there, and if they use any third party software (comparable to CPAN modules) they know the status of every package, if it supported on their platform or not.

I tried to ask them if they use a Java that was released more than 10 years, how many of the third party tools are available for that version?

Maybe all we need is a way to query the CPAN Testers database to show which version of each module has passed on a certain version of perl on a certain platform.

  1. Pick a perl version from a drop down list
  2. Pick a platform from a drop down list
  3. List all the modules that have successful test results in the given configuration and show the latest version (or all version) of those modules.

Maybe we need a smoke server with old versions of perl?

Maybe we need something else?

Maybe I should tell them if they are really interested in it they should setup their own smoke server?

Update I have started to generate lists of CPAN modules and their number of the highest version that has passed on each platform: Tested CPAN modules

In reply to CPAN modules on old versions of perl? by szabgab

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