in reply to What is a really old version of Perl?

I sympathise. Really, I do. I know what a pain it is testing your applications with new versions of their dependencies, deploying those new versions (and any necessary fixes to your code), all without breaking any live services. And it annoys me when some ignorant loudmouths in the community refuse to recognise the constraints that some monks have to work under.

But you can't expect people to support 5.8.8 any more. It's six years old now. By 2017 it'll be over a decade old and by 2020 it'll be legal to marry in some backward countries. You can't expect volunteers to maintain something for free for that long. If Red Hat are going to sell support contracts that are that long, then supporting the software is their problem.

I understand that DEC used to sell even longer support contracts for VMS. It got to be so burdensome that they were offering quite large sums of money to their customers to migrate to more recent releases and terminate the existing contracts.

  • Comment on Re: What is a really old version of Perl?

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Re^2: What is a really old version of Perl? (VMS)
by Argel (Prior) on Jun 26, 2012 at 23:22 UTC
    You read way too much into my post. My point was that it's not so unexpected to see questions from Monks still using Perl 5.8.8 (and by extension, pestering someone about it could be considered poor form).

    Regarding VMS, and going way off on a tangent, Hughes used it for the management software for their commercial satellite gear (PESVOC: Personal Earth Station Virtual Operator Console). We had maybe 8-10 Vaxes and I think four DEC Alpha's running VMS here several years back. PESVOC was an X-Windows app, so the networking teams accessed them via a Sun server and either Sun Rays (hardware thin clients) or Citrix XenApp for UNIX (aka MetaFrame for UNIX; software thin client). I assume the various buyouts forced Hughes to port the app to something a bit more modern (or rewrite it or replace it). As a side note, IIRC, Hughes wanted to (and did?) sell off the commercial part of the satellite business.

    Anyway, most companies have moved away from satellite to Frame-Relay, MPLS, ATM, DSL, etc.

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Re^2: What is a really old version of Perl?
by tobyink (Canon) on Jun 27, 2012 at 12:18 UTC

    "By 2017 it'll be over a decade old and by 2020 it'll be legal to marry in some backward countries."

    Backwards countries like Canada and (parts of) the United States? Granted you need a court order to marry at 14 in these places; but what marriage could be more legal than a court-ordered one?!

    I believe in Yemen you could marry Perl 5.16 - you just couldn't consummate that marriage. (I'm not entirely sure how you'd go about consummating marriage to a Perl release anyway. You'd probably need to install Sex.)

    perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'
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