Ocean of Awareness

[ This is cross-posted by invitation, from its home on the Ocean of Awareness blog. ]

Marpa::XS, Marpa::PP, and Marpa::HTML are obsolete versions of Marpa, which I have been keeping on CPAN for the convenience of legacy users. All new users should look only at Marpa::R2.

I plan to delete the obsolete releases from CPAN soon. For legacy users who need copies, they will still be available on backPAN.

I do this because their placement on CPAN placement makes them "attractive nuisances" -- they show up in searches and generally make it harder to find Marpa::R2, which is the version that new users should be interested in. There is also some danger a new user could, by mistake, use the obsolete versions instead of Marpa::R2.

It's been some time since someone has reported a bug in their code, so they should be stable for legacy applications. I would usually promise to fix serious bugs that affect legacy users, but unfortunately, especially in the case of Marpa::XS, it is a promise I would have trouble keeping. Marpa::XS depends on Glib, and uses a complex build which I last performed on a machine I no longer use for development.

For this reason, a re-release to CPAN with deprecatory language is also not an option. I probably would not want to do so anyway -- the CPAN infrastructure by default pushes legacy users into upgrading, which always carries some risk. New deprecatory language would add no value for the legacy users, and they are the only audience these releases exist to serve.

Comments

Comments on this post can be made in Marpa's Google group, or on our IRC channel: #marpa at freenode.net. To learn more about Marpa, there's the official web site maintained by Ron Savage. I also have a Marpa web site.