On Tuesday 04 April 2006 21:57, Adam Kennedy wrote: > Seeing as the worst support cases are about 10 years in a variety of > countries and situations, I think that is what we should be aiming for > for highly used CPAN modules. > > Which last time I checked is now 5.005.something > > So I aim there.
"Should" is nice and all, but until you start paying my invoices for the special $40 an hour for free software support (and not a one-time fee, 'cuz maintenance costs, but it's a much better deal than my usual consulting rate), it's just an opinion out there in the luminous aether somewhere and I'll go on quite happily giving people useful software because I enjoy it until I stop enjoying it. You're totally welcome to file bugs based on your dependency graph about what I should and shouldn't do. I'll cheerfully file them under "Not fun. Don't care. You get both pieces if it breaks." I get paid directly for approximately exactly zero of my CPAN coding. Thus if it's not fun, I don't do it. Supporting ancient software from the last millennium and coding with both hands tied behind my back to support Perl 5.005 and to work around all of its infelicities and bugs that I've helped to fix isn't fun... unless there's cash involved or someone else doing the work in such a way that I don't have to deal with the un-fun. I write software to make my life easier. If I can't use that software to make my life easier because people who are using that work I've done for free complain, well then what's my motivation? Could I write a test suite without Test::More? Yep. I've done it before. Could I write my own mock objects by hand without Test::MockObject or Test::MockObject extends? Absolutely. Do I know how to deal without lexical warnings or lexical filehandles or to use signals safely? Yep. Doesn't mean I want to go back to the bad old days. There have been what, a dozen stable releases of Perl since the last 5.005 release? If someone can't update to a newer release less than 8% of the time, that's all sorts of auto-face-stabby badness and not so much fun for me, and frankly TV and video games seem like more fun hobbies with less frustration, 'cuz I'm pretty sure I'm absolutely NOT getting any decent feedback from such a situation. Is there a business in supporting "classic" software in certain situations? Perhaps. That baby's not cute enough for anyone but its mother to love it though, in my opinion. Now if I've mistakenly claimed that a distribution requires Perl 5.6 as a minimum (which most of mine do, I believe) and it works further back, that's fine -- I'm happy to loosen that requirement. I have no desire to rule out the utility of my code in situations where it works without increasing my blood pressure. (Now if someone were to make warnings.pm a dual-lived module and put in a pre-5.6 compatibility mode, great! I don't mind marking a dependency on that so that my code works in more places. It's just when backwards compatibility become a millstone around my neck that I want to smash things and generally not spend time around my computer.) I don't think I'm so odd a developer in all this. -- c
