On Thu, 9 Apr 2009, David Cantrell wrote:
That's a hugely optimistic and naive statement, even if it's true most of
the time in the Perl community.
But lots of people who use modules from the CPAN aren't really in the
perl community, and that's important. Actually, there are lots of
people *in* the community who don't keep their toolchain up to date and
have no idea why it might be a good idea to upgrade from the CPAN.pm
that they installed a few years ago.
I think you misread my statement. I was saying that assuming everything
"just works better" because it's a newer rev is, again, optimistic and
naive. For that reason many of us choose to lag simply to let you blokes
that like cutting yourselves on the bleeding edge sort out the conflicts
for us. :-) For that reason I won't adopt Eric's philosophy of wanton
upgrading.
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.
Yes!
I care because not all my machines have been upgraded to 5.10. I care
because not all the machines at work have been upgraded. I care because
if I deliberately restrict my code to 5.10 only, then I restrict the
number of people who will be inclined to do my work for me and send
patches to fix my bugs.
A common plaint I hear about perl code *from people outside the
community* is that we have too many dependencies and our code is too
hard to install. And I can sympathise. If you don't know how to
configure CPAN.pm to automagically follow dependencies (incidentally,
why is the default prerequisites_policy still 'ask' and not 'follow'?)
then it's a gigantic pain in the arse. If on top of that you want them
to *upgrade perl* they're going to think you're mad.
And we should care about people outside the community, because they
vastly outnumber those of us *in* the community. They and their
opinions are important because they do things like influence which
technologies their employers use, and consequently how many jobs there
are for us.
Amen. I bow to your more eloquent explanation.
--Arthur Corliss
Live Free or Die
