On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 5:35 PM, <dhu...@hudes.org> wrote: > 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.
I'm very sympathetic to your concern. For a long time, Perl didn't have any formal support policy. That has changed in recent years under Jesse Vincent's leadership and Perl now has a policy: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlpolicy.html#MAINTENANCE-AND-SUPPORT The fundamental issue with backporting bugs to older Perls is lack of volunteer time to do the work. As Jesse's new policy puts it, "Perl 5 is developed by a community, not a corporate entity." I think one reason that Perl is generally pretty up to date on Debian-based systems is that the debian-perl group is very active and contribute regularly to the perl5-porters that maintains the Perl source. I don't really know what the story is for other OS groups. -- David
