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in reply to Re: Why upgrade perl?
in thread Why upgrade perl?

For these reasons, you will often have trouble installing CPAN modules
You're overstating the case. Granted, I'm a sample size of one, but, although my primary job description is "Perl programmer", I'm also the local devop[1], so I maintain several boxen running a mix of distros[2], some of which are rather ancient[3]. With the exception of Perl 5.8.x vs. 5.10, I have never encountered an issue with a CPAN module failing to install due to the system perl being too old. OP said he's currently on 5.10.1, so my experience suggests that this should not be an issue for him.

[1] ...and used to be a full-time sysadmin, once upon a time.

[2] The ones I install tend to run Debian and legacy systems are mostly Red Hat, but just about anything can pop up on occasion - SUSE, Mandriva, you name it.

[3] The current oldest is a Fedora Core 5 server, which we finally managed to start moving things off of just last week.

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Re^3: Why upgrade perl?
by sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on May 21, 2013 at 20:10 UTC

    I am frankly quite intrigued why you say, “overstating the case,” because I certainly have encountered incompatibility issues on a great many upgrades.   And, given that RedHat’s most-essential software tools run on Perl, that does become a serious concern.   I am not challenging your POV, but it does surprise me to hear this.

[reply]

      "And, given that RedHat’s most-essential software tools run on Perl, that does become a serious concern."

      Leaving the system Perl to the system is wise. Let the vendor do what they want, it's trivial to install your own Perl elsewhere.

[reply]
      I feel that it's an overstatement to say that a too-old version of perl will "often" cause problems when installing CPAN modules, given my own experience that such problems are extremely rare, with the one exception of pre-5.10 perl vs. post-5.10 modules. It's interesting to see that your experience has been the opposite and that makes me wonder which is actually the more common set of experiences.
[reply]

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