in reply to The need and the price of running on old versions of Perl


Although I almost always use 5.8+ (for it's superior Unicode handling) I still develop my CPAN modules using 5.005 so that they are available to the widest possible audience.

If people don't wish to support 4.0, 5.004, 5.005, 5.6 or any other version then perhaps there should be a move to End of Life them.

Until then I'll continue to support 5.005 if possible.

--
John.

Update: I probably should have linked to Software End of Life instead of Product End of Life.

  • Comment on Re: The need and the price of running on old versions of Perl

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Re^2: The need and the price of running on old versions of Perl
by szabgab (Priest) on Sep 18, 2007 at 11:07 UTC
    Quoting that link from wikipedia:
    End-of-life is a term used with respect to a retailed product, indicating that a vendor will no longer be marketing, selling, or promoting a particular product and may also be ending or limiting support for said product.
    We cannot stop marketing and selling perl 5.004 as we never did that. Recently I have not seen many people promoting that version of perl either. Does 5.004 or anything below 5.6.0 really still have support?
    Is 5.6.0 supported?
    What about 5.8.x< 5.8.8 ?
    We are not a corporation that needs to End of life a a version of Perl.

    It is nice that you make the effort to support old versions of Perl but I think we as a community should not have this as an expectation.

[reply]

      To many of its users, Perl is not a product, it's a tool. You use whatever version of Perl is available at the moment. Needing to upgrade the version of Perl means that you could likely easier accomplish the task at hand using a pipe system made out of sed, awk and ksh. This is why it's important to me not to place unnecessary restrictions on modules.

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        Sure, there are things that are easier with sed, awk and ksh. So use them.

        Besides, most of the tasks done easily with those tools can be done as easily with any version of Perl without the need of a module.

        When you really need a module you will probably find one that works on your version of Perl. It might not be the latest version of that module but do you really need the latest version?

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