Re: Stop suggesting to upgrade perl

[Argel]

I brought this up in What is a really old version of Perl?. As you have no doubt noticed by now, the majority of people posting in this thread have little to no understanding of how enterprise environments operate. There's a huge disconnect in the Perl community between developers and system administrators. Ironic, given Perl's roots. Sad too, of course. I doubt they even realize how hostile they come across or that the advice given may at times even be a career limiting move if followed. If there was a community wide effort to raise awareness, evangelize to vendors, etc. then maybe that would make a difference but I doubt the interest is there.

One thing you could try is putting your limitations in your signature (e.g. policy dictates that you have to use the Perl that ships with your distro and that it is against policy to download modules and manually install them (or just copy the .pm's in)m etc. and then reference that in your post. Then, you can at least berate someone for not reading the limitations in your environment.

[chromatic]

As you have no doubt noticed by now, the majority of people posting in this thread have little to no understanding of how enterprise environments operate.

One might equally as well say that these so-called enterprise environments have little to no understanding of negative externalities and the consequences of pushing their support burdens onto the volunteer commons.

[Argel]

And how is that relevant to this thread? The majority of posts show a gross lack of knowledge when it comes to how enterprises work, etc. -- aka a huge disconnect. And enterprises are not going to change, so if there is any interest in helping those of us that do work in those environments, it needs be directed/focused elsewhere. Encouraging Red Hat, Novel, etc. to ship with a second, newer version is one approach that may work. If there was a semi-official Perl distro that contained lots of additional modules that all of the vendors could make use of that would be even better.

But the reality is that sysadmins in the enterprise are second class citizens of the Perl community. And with responses from people like you that could help nudge things in the right direction but instead discourage it, there's no reason to expect that to change anytime soon. I know your time is limited, but next time could you consider using that time to help raise awareness of the situation instead? If more people talk about it, then maybe eventually the Perl Community will get to the point where it can ask "Why are these vendors shipping much old versions, causing many of our brethren to suffer needlessly, and causing some developers to support older versions of Perl longer? Is there something we can do to help change things?"