When do you upgrade perl?
How do you decide to move to another version of Perl? Some people use the latest version right away, some people make big jumps once a decade. Some never upgrade. What's your style?
I made a SurveyMonkey page for it: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DX5HW95.
Pass it around, tweet it, facebook it, buzz it, bump it, do whatever you crazy social kids do. Retweet it.
You don't have to justify anything. I don't really mind if you are using an older perl and I'm not going to tell you that you are wrong. There's room to explain yourself if you feel the need. Or, if you have a good restaurant recommendation, let me know about that too.
I'm the author of Mastering Perl, and the co-author of Learning Perl (6th Edition), Intermediate Perl, Programming Perl (4th Edition) and Effective Perl Programming (2nd Edition).
The form didn't really leave much room for ambiguity:
At work we still use 5.8.8 for our production environments; though not for lack of access to newer ones considering we're also hosting the www.cpan.org and the master CPAN mirror!
We're working on moving off mod_perl to make it easy to upgrade to 5.14.x (5.12.x when we started planning it). We appreciate the stability and care for backwards compatibility that goes into perl5.
At perl.org it's a mix of 5.8.3 (!) for some old things and mostly "something really new" via perlbrew. Other personal projects (NTP Pool) are 5.12.x or 5.14.x.
The poll should be at least split to work and personal projects.
redhats blatant refusal to take perl seriously is very damaging. come on they put an end of life perl version in their new os. (5.10 in rhel6)
For personal use, I try always the last stable version of perl. I like reading the perldelta pod :)
At work, we move when a new version can bring us some appreciate features. It was the case for 5.10 over 5.8.8 (//, given/when, smart-match op ~~, regex enhancements), and it will probably be the case of 5.14 over 5.10 (reduced memory footprint, regex /r). 5.12 did not bring enough things to justify an upgrade.
As others have pointed out, there's definitely a difference in work vs. personal projects.
My survey response was w.r.t. work. For personal use it's simply a matter of always grabbing the latest stable release.