Re: What's the perl5's future?

[stevieb]

perlpolicy is the document that describes the policy for the perl5-porters (those who maintain the perl core). Perl has always had the stance that backward compatibility is top priority, and work very hard to not break existing code.

If some author find their modules breaking on a new release of perl, they can and should always bring it to the attention of the perl5-porters email list.

This is why it is important to test your modules against perl-blead (trunk), so that if one of your modules breaks, you have that full release cycle to bring up your issues, and either argue perl should be changed, or fix your modules before the next official public release of perl is made available.

If an author is using undocumented pieces of perl internals (or is using documented parts in a non-conventional way) which breaks their code, they should bring it up to the maintainers to open a discussion. Whether this person did so or not I don't know. However, outright stating that the maintainers don't care about backward compatibility is both childish and irresponsible.

To complain about it after the fact, and release your own version of perl just for your modules is locking in your module users to using two separate versions of perl (that are incompatible) in their production environments.