For better or worse, the native Perl on Solaris 10 remains 5.8.4 as it was 5 years ago with Solaris 10 GA. IIRC Solaris 9 is 5.6. Lest you think nobody still runs Solaris 9 my employer does and they have a Perl application on it which is in transition to Solaris 10. Solaris 11 is I believe shipping with Perl 5.101 when it comes out RSN. I don't remember what AIX 6 has but I see to recall it was 5.8.8 Only Linux distributions ship with more recent Perl.
The OpenCSW project is working hard to get a 5.12 release out. This all brings up a point about maintenance of Perl: it is one thing to not release new features in 5.10.1 it is another to say since we have already 514 we won't consider bug fix releases for 5.10.1 Bundling stuff into core and making bug fixes unavailable to older Perl is another mess. Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone with Nextel Direct Connect -----Original Message----- From: Serguei Trouchelle <s...@cpan.org> Date: Mon, 04 Jul 2011 14:01:35 To: <module-authors@perl.org> Subject: Re: Making sure your module works on other OS-es as well Shmuel Fomberg wrote: >>> Because it gives the feeling that we support them. >>> I think that there is someone who is running a smoker on Perl 5.6. do we >>> want authors to get error reports because some feature that they used >>> does not exists or was buggy on that version? >> These reports clearly indicate that module is not supported on this >> particular version and platform. I don't see how 100% of FAIL/UNKNOWN >> reports can give someone the feeling of any support. > It says "the module is having problems on that platform, but we are > aware of it and it will be fixed. someday" It never says it. > If the version does not exists, it says "what are you talking about? I > have never heard of that version". It never says it either. I know well-working distributions without any tests (not that I like this situation but anyway). If you don't like to support any older version, why don't you just add "use 5.008009;" in Makefile.PL/Build.PL, or to META.yml? It's the most correct way to tell about what's the minimum version supported, and it's really easy. >>> I'm not advocating of throwing everything before 5.12, but I think that >>> version 5.8.9 if the earliest we should accept. >> I know one Fortune 50 company who runs Perl 5.8.5 in production. > I know one that uses Perl 5.6. so? So having test results for this version is helpful for those who use it. I think that most misunderstandings about CPAN Testers appear because module authors think that CPAN Testers is a tool to irritate authors, and sometimes a free auto-tester. But in fact, it's about helping users decide whether this particular distribution runs on their version/platform or not. -- Serguei Trouchelle
