-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Gerard
Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2007 9:30 AM
To: User Questions
Subject: Re[2]: The worst error message in history belongs to... BIND9!
On July 04, 2007 at 09:53AM Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
[snip]
Actually perl has a lot of problems too. One of the biggest is that
perl script writers always seem to think like you, in that perl is
consistent across all platforms.
The biggest problems I've seen with perl scripts are when people use
perl extensions that are not on the system. You then have to go find
the extension they use and very few of the perl script writers seem
to be smart enough to put a section at the beginning of their scripts
that define the CPAN location of the particular extensions they are
using. The second biggest problem is perl script writers using
constructs that are valid in Perl 5.6 and later but not valid in
Perl 5.0 I don't know how many times I've wanted to strangle
someone when trying to run a perl script under Perl 5.0 that had
ONE single friggin statement in the entire thousand line script that
isn't valid under 5.0 but is under 5.6 And I've also run across
a number of Perl extensions that won't run under 5.0 as well, even
though the authors are supposed to regression test under 5.0
I was under the impression that Perl 5.6.0 was released on 2000-Mar-22,
while Perl 5.000 was issued on or about 1994-Oct-17. For the life of
me, I cannot comprehend why anyone would be using such an antiquated
version.
I should have said the perl 5.0 family. Including 5.004 which is still
being maintained by the Perl maintainers. Perl 5.005-04 just came out
in 2004 by the way. perl 5.6.2 came out in Nov 2003.
I have a rather limited knowledge of Perl;
That's apparent.
however, I am not
going to be bothered regression testing it under a seven year old
obsoleted version.
There were major structural changes in perl 5.0 and 5.6 The changes
going from 5.6 to 5.8 and 5.9 are much less.
You can take it as a given that anything that runs on perl 5.005-04
will run on all perl 5.0 versions, anything that runs on perl 5.6.2
will run on all 5.6 versions, etc.
The whole reason that the perl project maintains 5.0, 5.6, 5.8 and
so on is that they know that there's systems that have lots of tested
programs that have been tested under 5.0 and the system maintainers
have not yet gone through the process of testing all that software
on newer perl versions. Despite what you probably believe, when
an organization has a server that is running fine, they are not
frothing at the mouth to upgrade it to the latest version.
This is why IMHO that perl is not a good choice to use for building
large systems, not because the perl maintainers don't understand
the importance of backwards compatability, but because too many
programmers like yourself simply don't.
If I was building a system that was ONLY going to use perl and
the modules supplied with it, and NOT use any other 3rd party
modules, then I would consider using perl, there wouldn't be
anything wrong with it.
But most of the perl scripts out there use many 3rd party modules
(and I understand why, it saves them time) and that is where you have
the problem, is with those.
I believe that FreeBSD-3.4 was released around
12/21/1999 or there about. Should we also be testing against that
version also?
I wasn't talking about 1999 software I was talking about 2004
software.
Ted
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