Well yes, perl 5.8.8 is a really, really old version of Perl. It was released in 2006 (6 years ago). The next maintenance release of the 5.8 series, 5.8.9, was released in 2008. It is now 4 (in words: four) major releases behind the state of the art.

The fact that some linux distribution chooses to ship such an outdated version doesn't change the fact that it's outdated.

For the Perl community, the solution cannot be to support old Perl versions forever, but to encourage timely upgrades.

Continually nagging about outlandishly outdated versions of Perl seems to be a good way to make people aware of that. Maybe the customers then can give feedback to RedHat (and not to perlmonks) that their Perl version is outdated, and they should change to a newer Perl version for their next release, please? Hey, even Debian Wheezy (which will be frozen soon, and released a while later) comes with perl 5.14.

And so, the next time someone asks a question about an older version of Perl, please keep in mind that that really old version might be what their current, still supported OS ships with.

The problem with that is that people expect to rest comfortably on their 6 year old Perl version, and still expect to use new stuff with it. Or to phrase it differently:

And so, the next time you ask about an outdated version of Perl, be aware that you are several years behind the times, and ask yourself if you can't get support from your OS vendor, who brought you into your current misery.