Re: 2021 is the year to drop support for Perl < 5.12?

[roboticus]

tobyink:

While I'm not really qualified^[1] to have an opinion on the issue, you might consider looking for another "natural" breakpoint: specifically the lowest version that gets installed by default among various Operating Systems. I don't know what version^[2] that might be, but looking at your 'hoops' argument, I think it feels similar--when people set up a box, they're going to get some minimum version X, and if they need to install an older version to support some application, they'll have a similar circus act to follow.

I don't know if that would give a different result than your suggestion of 5.12 or not, I'm just offering another thing to think about. Personally, I like 5.12 as a minimum version because I use // quite a bit and state occasionally.

Notes:

1. I've never been primary production support on large systems, so while I'm somewhat of an old hand at using perl, I typically run the version that comes by default when I install a *NIX distribution or Cygwin on a Windows box.
2. Again, I don't support production systems, so I just grab a distro that I'd like to use and go with it.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

[tobyink]

RHEL 7 has Perl 5.16. RHEL 6 has Perl 5.10(.1?). Ubuntu 14.04 has Perl 5.18.2.

But if someone's running a legacy OS, it's probably to support a legacy app, which can probably make do with an older version of my package.

[Tux]

I collect what distro (276) ships with what perl release here as part of System::Info.

[hippo]

RHEL6 does indeed have 5.10.1. However, it just went EoL at the end of last month so you could well feel justified in crossing that one off the list.