I know that, you know that. This is an ongoing battle that's been going on for at least the past 2 years .. and shows no sign of getting sorted out yet.

I can understand the Perl version, mind - it'll take a fairly hefty number of developer hours to go through all of the code we have that works around Perl 5.004 bugs (or, worse, fails to run on later versions of Perl) to fix issues.

Unfortunately, in the "here and now", I'm stuck with what I have to work with. It's stupid, it's causing problems, but it's the way things are.