Timeline for rolling out 5.8.9 and 5.10.0

[talexb]

According to the Perl source code page on CPAN, 5.8.9 is now 14 days old, and will be the last 5.8 release. 5.10.0 is over a year old and presumably ready for use in Production.

Leaving aside discussion of Perl 6 for now, can I ask what versions of Perl folks are testing, rolling out and using in production? We have currently standardized on 5.8.8 on our Ubuntu (workstation) and Solaris (production) platforms, and I'm wondering about the pros and cons of making small step to 5.8.9 or a larger one to 5.10.0.

[demerphq]

The thing is the more people that use Perl 5.10.0, test or production, the more likelyhood 5.10.1 will be a really good release. Just like the amount of people that used 5.9.$latest influences how well baked it was.

So if you are contemplating switching to 5.10.x, then now would be the time to try 5.10.0 on your test suites and report any outstanding issues, while 5.10.1 should be coming fairly soon, 5.10.2 probably won't be out for a while.

[moritz]

5.10.0 is over a year old and presumably ready for use in Production.

The age just means that most CPAN modules now work with perl-5.10.0, not that 5.10.0 got better in any respect.

Although there are many bugfixes in the branch for 5.10.1, IMHO 5.10.0 is very usable, and it's what most linux distributions ship by default these days (including the upcoming Debian Lenny).

Upgrading to 5.8.9 and then later on to some version of 5.10 feels like a wast of resources to me, so if you plan to do any upgrade that might break binary compatiblity, pick 5.10 now.

[MidLifeXis]

I use 5.8.8 because one of our vendor libraries (the reason for my existence) requires 5.8. It is not worth the time or the effort to do the testing required to advance to 5.8.9.

Our vendor's next step will be to 5.10.x (already been warned), so at that time, I will be moving to the latest 5.10.x version that allows my application to run. Already implementing steps to help ease that transition.

I have started to make use of the tracking features of git to keep the vendor branch of my local perl repository current, and hope to make use of it in the very near future to ensure that my development environment is as up to date as is possible.

We will see how it works.

[JavaFan]

Now that the Perl repository is stored in git, 5.10.1 should be out soon. 5.10.0 is as production ready the day it was released as it's now ;-) (The previous sentence doesn't voice an opinion on whether 5.10 is production ready or not - but 5.10.0 is either production ready for you, or it isn't; perl versions aren't like wine or cheese, they don't ripe over time).

As for me, in some environments, I run 5.10; it's "production ready" for the tasks it's needed it for. In other environments, it isn't. And some environments will stay on 5.8.x. The cost of testing whether everything will remain working on 5.10.01 doesn't outweight the benefits of switching.

[akho]

Actually, they do ripe over time; if 5.10 was incompatible with some module that is important for you, it's probably fixed by now. In this sense the 5.10 release is more production ready now than it was when it was released.

Not that I know of any particular cases, just sayin'.

[smiffy]

I recently finished the deployment of 5.10.0 to my web servers, so am now using that exclusively for web applications.

All boxes still have their own 'system Perl', generally 5.8.8.