I hope you guys don't mind if I interject...
On Wed, 8 Apr 2009, Eric Wilhelm wrote:
That depends on who one is. ?If you're writing specifically for people
who keep their toolchain and perl religiously up-to-date,
There's nothing religious about it. You upgrade, it works better.
That's a hugely optimistic and naive statement, even if it's true most of
the time in the Perl community. Regressions happen.
But, anyway, is it a problem we really need to be inflicting on new Perl
users? Do they have to care if "somebody might be running 5.8.8
somewhere"? With 5.10.0 out for well over a year now?
Hell, yes, *I* care. Developers should be aware of portability if they
expect the code to run anywhere outside of the machines they control. The
reality is that there are a lot of installations that lag current perl
releases by years, either because some OS versions are in maintenance-mode
only, or because many commercial Unices are always slow to upgrade. As I
said before, regressions happen, and the "bleeding edge" is called
"bleeding" for a reason. For those reason I still test my code back to
Perl 5.6.x.
And anyway, if the trouble with using something is that it's "not core",
the fix is not to get it into the core. Rather, we should try to
make "coreness" not matter.
You're right, but you're massively oversimplifying the problem. Practical
reality has to have influence at some point. I still use EU::MM myself
because I know that it will work pretty much everywhere. Not everyone is
willing (and rightfully so) to install twenty other modules just to install
and use the functionality of one.
--Arthur Corliss
Live Free or Die
