What I want from the Perl 5 support policy

Author: fREW Schmidt

13 May

This is in response to chromatic’s post Writing Perl 5′s Support Policy

I want to be able to use the support policy as a reason to convince customers with lots of Perl installs that they need to update. A big part of this means an easy upgrade.

Probably most of the people using Perl 5 are in Unix. That makes it easier for you folks. On Windows installing Perl is no simple task, either ActivePerl or Strawberry Perl.

For example, at $work we use Apache/mod_perl. (I don’t wanna hear your “FastCGI! FastCGI! FastCGI!”, none of you people have actually helped me so far!) Let’s say I want to use the shiny new Perl 5.11. I install it. Awesome. Wait! mod_perl doesn’t work! Ok, reinstall that. Oh wait! All of my XS/compiled modules don’t work! etc etc. I understand the fact that Windows is a second class citizen here, but in Unix you probably have the same issue. You just made some kind of package to install it all at once or something. That’s great, but does it help me? Is updating really supported?

On a side note a point that my boss made when we discussed this issue is the fact that the community may not support Perl 5.8 in the future, but if companies will pay for it, ActiveState will probably support it. This is good for the customers and helps the community, so I’d say that’s really a win-win.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Take ‘em or leave ‘em.

Filed under: perl

3 Responses for "What I want from the Perl 5 support policy"

Adam Kennedy May 14th, 2009 at 12:49 am 1
As far as I’m concerned, I see the appropriate (and achievable) Long Term Support period for Perl as being around 8-10 years.

That is, code written for the latest version now should have a reasonable chance to run without significant changes on whatever Perl we have 8-10 years from now.

If you look back at when the backwards-looking CPAN toolchain modules finally cave in and shift up their Perl dependencies, this seems to fall into about that range.

As for upgrading, Perl is not upgradable across major revisions without reinstalling modules. It’s as simple as that.

And WRT Strawberry itself, I plan to continue building it for 5.8 pretty until the entire CPAN toolchain no longer works on it and moves on (since Strawberry is very much integrated with the CPAN toolchain).

I expect that to be around about 7 years from now.
Alexandr Ciornii May 18th, 2009 at 5:27 pm 2
Upgrading is easier on Windows – on Linux Perl is too tightly integrated into OS and it’s packages. But many dists now support OS upgrade – kernel and all packages will be upgraded to new version. Or compile new version of Perl and install it into some dir.

Recompiling modules is easier – just create bundle with CPAN shell. Modules may not work with dev version 5.11, but with 5.12 they will work soon after it’s release.

Perl programming rulez!
How to Prevent Perl 5.12 | rapid-DEV.net June 14th, 2009 at 11:28 pm 3
[...] While thinking about a documented support policy for Perl 5, I came across a comment from Adam Kennedy: I see the appropriate (and achievable) Long Term Support period for Perl as being around 8-10 years. [...]