The End Of 5.6 Is Nigh!
It's that time again! Time when I hammer the last few nails in the coffin of a version of Perl. A few years back, I killed 5.004 and 5.005 in a stroke by uping the minimum version of Test::More, upon which 80% of CPAN relies, from 5.004 to 5.6.0. In a few months I'll be doing it again.
The next major release of Test::More (aka Test::Builder1.5) will support 5.8.1 and up. ExtUtils::MakeMaker will probably go that way, too. This effectively cuts off most of CPAN from 5.8.0 and down. It will happen in the next few months.
Test::More might nudge its requirement a little higher depending on just how difficult it is to work around threading bugs in the earlier 5.8 releases.
At this point I don't imagine this will cause too much disruption. There aren't many serious 5.6 users left and whomever is left has to have already come up with some sort of 5.6PAN solution.
Dropping 5.6 will ease maintenance and testing of these modules and make a greater baseline of core modules available. However, if a company or organization would like to see 5.6 compatibility retained, they can contact me about sponsoring the extra work for continued maintenance.
Thanks to Sarathy and rgs for some great and long lived releases! It's been a good eight years.
Schwern
Slayer of Pseudo-Hashes
Defender of Lexical Encapsulation
Destroyer of Perl Versions
Ya know, the guy who tells you to write tests and not use MakeMaker.
Please contact me if you are planning to go north of 5.8.1. I will unconditionally donate my time to make T::B work around whatever it is you run into.
@Peter Wow, thanks for the offer! I likely will. I hope you're up on your threads voodoo!
If it gets bad, there will likely be a separate minimum for threads support.
There will be trouble if you go past 5.8.3 as well, since that's the Oracle version last time I checked.
Oracle (Solaris 10) is 5.8.4 if
/usr/perl5/bin/perl -vcan be trusted.Thanks for the heads up.
I'll try, but I'm not getting paid by Oracle to sweep up after them being seven years out of date. If someone knows somebody at Oracle who wants to change that, I'm all ears for sponsorship. I'm sure those Solaris licenses cost a pretty penny.
We still have some 5.8.2 machines in production, but we are actively working on getting everything upgraded to 5.14.x, which should hopefully be completed in a few months, all factors considered.