I have read the posts linked in your message. > should I as a CPAN author/maintainer/adopter accommodate for people > running old perl5s
It's your choice. You are in charge of the software, so you get to decide. I'm certain that's how it's been generally handled in past, too. Are you asking to establish a policy that applies to everyone? I don't think that's viable. Or do you want confirmation that you handled your particular case correctly? I think you did fine by giving away PAUSE permissions. ---- It is completely okay * to not accommodate people asking for older Perl compat. * to not accept compat. patches for any or no reason * to ask for payment adequate with the increased maint. burden ---- If you think that people asking for older Perl compat. is bothersome, you can do some things so it does not happen so often. The first three are easy to do. 1. Analyse the code with <http://p3rl.org/perlver>. If the minimum explicit version is set and greater than the minimum syntax version, change the explicit version. Put the resulting minimum version into the meta files/Build.PL and document it that the number results from code analysis. 2. If you bump the minimum version number, document the reason in the changelog. 3. Use <http://p3rl.org/Syntax::Construct> and <http://p3rl.org/feature> so that users of older Perls get nice error messages. 4. Document your policy about older Perl compat. on your homepage (the page requires a tracked version number and a publishing date) and link to it from your distro's documentation. It can be a simple statement what you generally intend to do when people ask for older Perl compat., and you could kindly ask the supplicants to evaluate the numerous other avenues for dealing with their problem before contacting you: in-house CPAN mirrors/distroprefs/patch queues, paying DrHyde for <http://cpxxxan.barnyard.co.uk/>, Alt distros… 5. Use <http://p3rl.org/perlver> to find pieces of syntax and preemptively change them to their 5.8 equivalent.
