mused.bear has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

upgrading from 5.004_04 to 5.8.0 for sun4-solaris. would appreciate your observations or point to some sources that list out the gotchas, deprecated functions, new things that work well. much thx

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Re: upgrade help
by Corion (Patriarch) on Jan 14, 2006 at 21:52 UTC

    The differences are listed in the perldelta files between the versions. From 5.004 to 5.8, there have been many enhancements, from lexical filehandles to new features in regular expressions and unicode handling. From what I know, no functions have been deprecated.

    But if you have no peculiar itch to scratch, why are you upgrading? If the (really old, I admit) version of Perl you have works for you, I would not upgrade.

    My tip is to install 5.8.7 in parallel, say under /opt/perl/5.8.7, so that you have both versions of Perl available. I'm not aware of Sun utilities that rely on a specific version of Perl, but I would not risk losing them by upgrading the system perl interpreter.

    Perl 5.8.7 should compile (and work) well under Solaris.

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Re: upgrade help
by ysth (Canon) on Jan 15, 2006 at 09:36 UTC
    Please don't upgrade to 5.8.0. There've been a lot of bugfixes under the bridge since then. The current stable release is 5.8.7.
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