I sympathise. Really, I do. I know what a pain it is testing your applications with new versions of their dependencies, deploying those new versions (and any necessary fixes to your code), all without breaking any live services. And it annoys me when some ignorant loudmouths in the community refuse to recognise the constraints that some monks have to work under.

But you can't expect people to support 5.8.8 any more. It's six years old now. By 2017 it'll be over a decade old and by 2020 it'll be legal to marry in some backward countries. You can't expect volunteers to maintain something for free for that long. If Red Hat are going to sell support contracts that are that long, then supporting the software is their problem.

I understand that DEC used to sell even longer support contracts for VMS. It got to be so burdensome that they were offering quite large sums of money to their customers to migrate to more recent releases and terminate the existing contracts.

In reply to Re: What is a really old version of Perl? by DrHyde
in thread What is a really old version of Perl? by Argel

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