in reply to Re^3: Some trouble with closures
in thread Some trouble with closures

I don't get this argument. We always tell people to download the whole world from CPAN, even offering how to use modules if you can't install them the place your sysadmin does.

But going to CPAN and getting perl itself is somehow a big NoNo?

It's not so much a "NoNo" as potentially a lot of work for the testing staff and/or the sysadmins.

If you install a new module from CPAN, that module can't break your existing code, because there isn't any. No additional testing is needed to prove that you can safely promote your code.

If you need to upgrade an existing CPAN module, you will need to do some extra testing to in order to prove that the new version doesn't break any existing production code which uses that CPAN module.

If you need to upgrade perl itself, you need to do a lot of extra testing to prove that the new version of perl doesn't break any existing production code that uses perl.

Depending upon how much perl code is in production, this can be a lot of extra work. I've seen a new installation take several weeks to approve and complete.

Whether or not it's worth it to do that work is a business decision: based upon some kind of a cost/benefit analysis of the relative merits, costs, and risks.

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Re^5: Some trouble with closures
by JavaFan (Canon) on Feb 19, 2010 at 23:26 UTC
    Your argument might have some sense if there was only one possible perl on a system.

    But that isn't true. If it is an issue to upgrade /some/path/to/perl, then you can always use /some/other/path/to/perl. Or you call them /usr/bin/perl5.10.1, /usr/bin/perl5.11.3, /usr/bin/perl5.8.8 and have /usr/bin/perl be a link to whatever default you fancy.

    Depending upon how much perl code is in production, this can be a lot of extra work. I've seen a new installation take several weeks to approve and complete.
    But that's not a reason to assume that's true in general -- and I'm certainly not going to assume some kind of installment/upgrade policy when answering questions. Furthermore, organisations that have procedures in place for installing/upgrading new software usually have that for, uhm, new software. Whether that's perl, a C compiler, a CPAN module, or whatever their development department throws over the fence.
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