Tony, How many corporations have you worked for? Many of the ones I have done work at uses old versions of everything from Java JDKs to Perl versions. The reason? They have so many developers coding away over the years that if they upgrade, they need to do a LOT of regression testing.
I know of corporations still using Perl 5.004 seriously and in order to get 5.005 or 5.6.1 installed for your application, they would require justification as to why support 2 versions of Perl in an organization. ie why install 5.6.1 for your application when 100 applications run fine on Perl 5.004. This isn't meant to be a flame and I don't want to see a whole slew of arguments about how to test Perl's in parallel or other things. If you do that, you are preaching to the choir. The point of this reply is to tell you that there are significant organizations out there that simply do not move forward with regards to infrastructural elements very quickly. Yet these are the same organizations that would likely benefit from P5EE. It is conceivable that P5EE might push them to upgrade similarly to how J2EE really pushed an upgrade from JDK 1.1 to JDK 1.2 to support servlets/JSPs better. But now see how few of those same corporates are on JDK 1.3... :) I am not saying we should support 5.004, but I am saying that Stas is correct that if you shoot too high, you may miss the flock (or something like that). So just please consider that it's not just Mom and Pop ISPs that are like this. It is also corporations. Please just consider this in the votes that you make. But obviously temper it with whatever features you think are necessary. I will make a separate post regarding my specific opinions on 5.005, 5.6.0, and 5.6.1 and 5.8.0 At 02:23 AM 1/3/2002, Tony Bowden wrote: >On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 01:53:31AM +0800, Stas Bekman wrote: > > A. Installing Perl is not easy unless you know-how or have a binary > > RPM/DEB/etc > > B. Consider ISPs which won't let you install/support a newer version > >Whilst I agree with these in the context of considering which versions >of perl to support for a small web application that you wan't to be as >'plug-n-play' as possible, I'm not so convinced in the enterprise world. > >I had thought the "target market" for much of this would be organisations >who would probably have (pretty much) complete control over their own >environments (bypassing 'B') and someone with enough clue to get a >working version of perl... (although many places may not want to move to >something too close to the bleeding edge, but if 5.6.1 is pretty >standard now then I'd definitely say it should be fine). > >Or have I misunderstood? > >Tony >-- >-------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Tony Bowden | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.tmtm.com/ > And if you need my attention Be bizarre >-------------------------------------------------------------------------- __________________________________________________ Gunther Birznieks ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) eXtropia - The Open Web Technology Company http://www.eXtropia.com/
