It's not that big a deal when new dists require a higher minimum perl version. But when a member of the steering committee bumps the required minimum versions of most of his many dists to 5.12, for no technical reason that's a bad sign. And many of his dists are upstream, so he's effectively forcing all dists that depend on his to also have an artificial minimum required perl version than is necessary. His self-contradictory rationale:
This library should run on perls released even a long time ago. It should work on any version of perl released in the last five years.
Although it may work on older versions of perl, no guarantee is made that the minimum required version will not be increased. The version may be increased for any reason, and there is no promise that patches will be accepted to lower the minimum required perl.
Now I just noticed that File::Rename is also preparing to bump it's min rquired perl version. From the README from it's newest release:
This release is a step towards C<use v5.32> or C<use v7> compatibilty
That dist might not be upstream, but it's heavily referenced on many sites.
Is increasing the minimum required perl version a step towards breaking the tradition of backwards compatibility and paving the way for the breaking changes that v7 advocates were championing?
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