Modules in core: who cares?
When I first read about the idea to remove CGI.pm from core, I was like "Yeah!". And then I thought about it and I was like "meh".
Who cares? Your typical noob that needs to be protected from the horrors of CGI.pm is not the kind of guy who builds his own perl. He is also not the kind of guy who uses an up-to-date perl. He probably has some company server running 5.8 or he might use whatever his hoster installed. Before he learns that there even is a core, he'll have a zoo of spaghetti cgi-scripts that won't work when using strictures.
But here is someone who will care about a missing CGI: the package maintainers of all the Linux distros out there. They will have to decide whether to pack CGI.pm into their main perl-package or whether to put it in its own new package. Since there are about a gazillion packages that quietly depend on CGI.pm, their most likely choice will be the former option.
So what I am trying to say is: You will not kill CGI.pm by removing it from core. But removing it from core will also not be noticed by any kind of user who doesn't know how to use a cpan client.
Random observations that may in some way be related to Perl.
I do not know why people debate about it. what I care most about perl are Subroutine Signatures and Moo(se). If any version ship with it, I will upgrade it immediately. For now, I do not even have the motivation to upgrade to v5.18. I am currently in v5.14.
No one is trying to kill CGI.pm.
What’s in the crosshairs is the p5p maintenance burden for CGI.pm and the small but undue boost that CGI.pm gets from being the (allegedly!) always-there option.
The fact that removing it makes so little effective difference in practice (as you outlined) actually makes it feasible to kill these issues by throwing it out of core.
Or in short:
Yes, exactly.
confuseAcat, I strongly disagree on your "typical noob" definition.
As of my experience most of the people who start learning and using perl nowadays start with 5.14. And this relates both self-education or company workers I meet.
It's a non-issue. Many Linux distros are already putting CGI.pm into a separate package. For example, I have to run "yum install perl-CGI" on RHEL and CentOS to install CGI.pm.