Re: Why upgrade perl?

At some point older versions will not be supported and have unpatched security vulnerabilities, module updates won't run on older versions of Perl etc.

You should take the opportunity to work out some form of company wide regular upgrade process and to make it as painless as possible. I'm not sure about the benefits of being right on the leading edge, but you shouldn't be too far behind it.

Update: Some people have pointed out that releases are customised and may be difficult to upgrade. There is an argument for leaving the system Perl unaffected and having an independent site Perl, which is hopefully kept up to date.

If you spot any bugs in my solutions, it's because I've deliberately left them in as an exercise for the reader! :-)

Comment on Re: Why upgrade perl?

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Re^2: Why upgrade perl? by poulhs (Beadle) on May 20, 2013 at 09:24 UTC
I agreee that one should not fall too far behind... (tell RedHat) Company wide upgrade process is in place, that is (concerning this subject): follow RedHat on Linux.. We use satellite server for maintaining OS and other packages. We are a managed hosting company, and keeping the servers updated is natural. We use perl to write integration code between CMDB and other stuff, on our own infrastructure servers - and here we have the possibility to install our own tools if we need I know that older versions are not supported by the community (and that the support from RedHat may vary;-) ) My problem is that I lack the arguments, when there are no significant differences between 5.10.1 and 5.18.0. Yes, I know about the security issues, but that goes for all RedHat stock stuff, and as long as we don't expose our services to the public, I think that this argument will only hold half-way through... thanks for your answer	[reply]
Re^2: Why upgrade perl? by vsespb (Chaplain) on May 20, 2013 at 09:15 UTC
At some point older versions will not be supported and have unpatched security vulnerabilities I don't think this is valid argument for RHEL. They maintain and fix perl by their selves AFAIK. module updates won't run on older versions of Perl I didn't see much modules, which won't work on perl 5.10 and even 5.8 (but I didn't check some huge frameworks)	[reply]
Re^3: Why upgrade perl? by Your Mother (Archbishop) on May 20, 2013 at 14:11 UTC
RedHat shipped a badly crippled version of perl a few years ago and took a long time (almost two years, IIRC) to fix the situation after being notified.	[reply]
Re^4: Why upgrade perl? by vsespb (Chaplain) on May 20, 2013 at 14:17 UTC
Yep, probably something like this could happen. But I'm wondering what was the problem exactly?	[reply]
Re^5: Why upgrade perl? by zwon (Abbot) on May 20, 2013 at 14:58 UTC
Re^5: Why upgrade perl? by Your Mother (Archbishop) on May 20, 2013 at 14:36 UTC


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