On Wed, 5 Apr 2006 18:30:33 +0200, Tels <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Moin, > > On Wednesday 05 April 2006 06:57, Adam Kennedy wrote: > > chromatic wrote: > > > On Tuesday 04 April 2006 10:32, Tels wrote: > > >>There is also the point that supporting ancient Perls means you > > >>can't use all the new, wonderfull features that were added to later > > >>versions of Perl, like our, warnings etc. > > > > > > This to me is the biggest problem. After 6 years, is it finally okay > > > for me to use such exotic features as lexical warnings and lexical > > > filehandles, just to satisfy someone who refuses to upgrade an eight > > > year old installation of Perl? > [snip] > > > I'm trying to figure out why I've been sending patches to p5p for > > > about five years now if people complain when I take advantage of the > > > bugs they fix. At some point, it would be nice if people were to use > > > software released this millennium. > > > > Ever written software for government? > > Yes. And I don't know which parts of the mystical government you speak > off, but people everywhere are pretty pissed of when they have to work > with 10 year old software.
We *only* have local government as customers, and they get *my* perl, installed in *our* tree. Of course my perl includes defined-or :) > Hell, there are problems getting hardware that still runs that old stuff. :) One customer ran production on a system so old that they didn't dare to reboot it, because they were affraid it was not going to boot again. OK, that was 6 years ago, but still, government is a strange customer. > > It's routine to be required to offer a 10 year support period. > > Yes, but that does not mean that you need to upgrade the installation with > "the-latest-foo-bar-from-cpan-which-just-breaks-on-5.004". You just keep > the system as it is and patch when breakage really occurs. :) I don't care if their default perl breaks down. That would be their fault. As long as they don't break mine. Perl has the advantage of not being tied to "this product *must* be installed in /usr (and yes, we *do* have a third party that still sets that requirement for their product), symlinks to the rescue. > > This comes up more often that you might think. > > > > And so as my gold standard for back-compatability, I use 10 years. A > > decade is a nice round number. > > Ugh - but at least we don't have 16 fingers :) 5.8.3 is the minimum to accept for me, and it should have defined-or > > If it's something that isn't very core'y, I use a secondary support > > period of 5 years. > > > > 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. > > I wont :) me neither > best wishes, -- H.Merijn Brand Amsterdam Perl Mongers (http://amsterdam.pm.org/) using & porting perl 5.6.2, 5.8.x, 5.9.x on HP-UX 10.20, 11.00, 11.11, & 11.23, SuSE 10.0, AIX 4.3 & 5.2, and Cygwin. http://qa.perl.org http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/ http://www.test-smoke.org http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/
