On 2006-01-31 09:40:32 +1100, Ron Savage wrote: > On Mon, 30 Jan 2006 12:55:53 +0100, Peter J. Holzer wrote: > > Redhat EL 2.1 perl 5.6.1 supported until May 2009 > > Redhat EL 3 perl 5.8.0 supported until Oct 2010 > > Oh. I didn't know that. Thanx. > > > So, if Tim wants to support those sysadmins who run distributions > > as long as they are supported, he will have to support 5.6.1 for at > > least 3 more years. > > But this begs the question: What's wrong with the current level of support? > > That is, even if DBI is updated, people aren't forced to install the upgrade, > are they? In every case, they /choose/ to upgrade or not, and each course of > action has its own consequences :-).
Normally, don't think this is a problem. Machines with an old
distribution are usually stable: They have been installed years ago,
they are doing their job, and there isn't much reason to change anything
except for the occational security or bug fix. So it doesn't matter
that DBI 1.51 needs perl 5.8.1 or whatever, because they have already
installed DBI 1.18 and they aren't going to upgrade it.
There are two exceptions:
* Some shops have a "all servers must have the same version of the same
OS" policy. So they may have settled on Redhat EL 2.1 when it was new
and they will continue to install new servers with Redhat EL 2.1 until
2008, when they will upgrade all servers to RHEL 7 (or whatever will
be current then). So for new applications, they may find that they
need a recent version of DBD::foo, which in turn needs a newer version
of DBI which needs a newer version of perl.
* Occationally, a bug or security hole needs to be fixed and backporting
the fix to a very old version is too much effort, so the affected
software needs to upgraded to the current version: Then you have the
same dependency chain as above.
I do agree that these problems are the problems of the sysadmins (and
occationally the programmer), and should not unduly hinder the
development of DBI. I consider it reasonable if a specific version of a
perl module requires a version of perl which is not more than 2.5 resp.
3.5 years[0] older than the module itself. So if Tim wants to require
perl 5.8.0 or even 5.8.1 for the next release of DBI, I say go ahead!
hp
[0] perl 5.8.0 was released on 18 July 2002 (hey, that was my 35th
birthday :-).
perl 5.8.1 was released on 25 Sept 2003.
--
_ | Peter J. Holzer | If I wanted to be "academically correct",
|_|_) | Sysadmin WSR | I'd be programming in Java.
| | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | I don't, and I'm not.
__/ | http://www.hjp.at/ | -- Jesse Erlbaum on dbi-users
pgpi9usygV14v.pgp
Description: PGP signature
