in reply to Re: Stop suggesting to upgrade perl
in thread Stop suggesting to upgrade perl
I suppose I should have put more emphasis the importance of the intended operating environment.
I am not opposed at all to running a reasonably recent version of Perl when possible. But it must be borne in mind that there can be considerable time and expense involved for a company to do this. I would be hard pressed to defend the practice of upgrading every time an even-numbered version of Perl came out.
Tools such as perlbrew make it simple for individuals, but even then, there can be problems if the process takes too long to run and the hosting server (if one is being used) decides to terminate the process. I had this happen to me when installing 5.16 and wound up doing it with --notest and then going back and running the tests manually just for sanity's sake. Part of the cause of this problem can be attributed to the ever-growing number of core modules, it seems.
I agree with the OP that just automatically saying to upgrade is not always the most practical solution. Unless the problem involved is the result of a bug that can only be properly rectified by an upgrade, I think it is better to suggest a solution that works on the version the requester has, if possible.
All this being said, I prefer having a recent, reliable version of Perl on a production platform when it makes sense to upgrade. I, too, like the //= operator a lot and use it regularly at work. But that by itself could not justify the expense of an enterprise wide upgrade when I was restricted to 5.8.8, and certainly doesn't justify (in my mind) requiring the use of 5.10 as a minimum version in a CPAN module.