Mojo ppl, what have you done?!
Today I came home to read this: Mojolicious 1.3 Deprecated Perl 5.8.x support..
This makes me real sad, and here's why. Probably 90+% of all low cost shared web hosting providers still have Perl 5.8.x installed. I know Perl 5.8 is 10 yrs old, but go convince them to upgrade. There's no way to upgrade it, even on request. Absolute most of the ones I know run CPanel as a front end for the clients, and don't provide shell access. CPanel these days, though, is happy to install any CPAN module for you in one click, and it's really cool comparing to the alternative -- contact technical support with request to install it for you, if that is even an option.
When I learned of Mojolicious, I thought, wow, no dependencies and ease of writing web stuff! Finally we're gonna have people start writing web applications that anybody can install as easy as php app. One click in CPanel, upload, set rights on couple of files and folders, and you're good to go. Perl ppl are smart, they can do cool and useful stuff, and end users won't have to be Perl and nix gurus to install them, and won't need to be worrying that they are overpaying for hosting just so they can run some web app for themselves / friends / family / small community / play around with Perl & web dev / etc. Lots of Perl Intermediates and beginners and Perl-slackers can get involved in such projects because it's easy coding!
But that won't happen now. Thanks a lot guys, this sux.
I blog about Perl.
Just FYI: I still use Mojolicious on a server with Perl 5.8.4. If you edit the Makefile, it'll install and -- AFAICT -- it works fine for the basic things I'm using it for.
Phillip.
Perl 5.10 has been around for almost 5 years. I think that's a reasonable timeframe for your hosting company to upgrade if they want to support modern Perl applications. 5.10(.1 especially) wasn't a minor or trivial release. It has a lot of great stuff that makes it worthwhile to use.
If your hosting company disagrees and can't be bothered to upgrade, they're obviously not the right hosting company for you or others who wish to run newer software.
Luckily, there are 4.2*10^8 hosting companies in the world... so you can vote with your wallet. :)
RHEL does indeed need to join the 21st century and ship a modern version of Perl 5, but I have to agree with the Mojolicious developers here. If the question comes down to doing amazing things with Perl 5 or supporting unsupported versions of the language, requiring a Perl 5 version released in the past five years is indeed a reasonable choice.
Finally! That's the way to go. Supporting old Perl versions is just like writing HTML and JavaScript that needs to comply with IE5.
I wonder if CPanel can do perlbrew...
RHEL 6 (Novemeber 2010) has 5.10.1. But most hosting providers have CentOS. Latest version of CentOS is still based on RHEL 5.
5.10.1 is better than I thought, but if they "support" it for seven years, that's still a mess.
FYI, DotCloud is running perl 5.12.3, and deploying to it is even easier than messing with CPanel ... just write Makefile.PL and the dependencies will be automatically pulled in.
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It's no longer happening, deprecation has been reverted, the Perl community is sadly not ready for it. http://mojolicio.us/perldoc?Mojolicious/Guides/FAQ#Why_is_using_Perl_52E82Ex_such_a_bad_idea3F
Thank you Sebastian, and everyone involved in creating and improving Mojolicious.
Perl 5.8.9 was released two and a half years ago. (Sorry if this comment repeats, I submitted it before but it didn't appear.)