[DBIx-Class-Devel] Summary of the AllHands 27.11.2012

[Peter Rabbitson]

On Mon, Dec 03, 2012 at 01:19:59PM -0500, Brendan Byrd wrote:
> > - We again underlined that 5.8.3 is still the perl version we support
> > minimum. I think its important to mention that here, cause its not
> > written down. Technical longtime, the AllHands meeting is the only
> > place where those kind of requirements should get changed. Everyone
> > needs a voice here to stand up.
> 
> Probably need to figure out how long we are supporting that, and what
> kind of indicators would we check to figure out when this version would
> be too old.  (For example, oldest Debian release that uses Perl 5.8.)

My 2c on that:

Given that 5.8 (as in 5.8.8/5.8.9) is a rather good release[1] I see its 
useful life at a *minimum* of 3-4 more years, with a much longer median. 
Furthermore given I've seen newbie questions from a 5.8.4 environment[2] 
as recently as 3 months ago and the fact that the differences between 
the 5.8 series are not that drastic, I do not see a reason to declare a 
higher 5.8 dependency than 5.8.3.

Moreover there is exactly zero burden on the rest of the dev team, as I 
am always interested in doing this kind of backcompat work[3]. The only 
limitation imposed is not to use syntactic sugar (mainly //) - I do not 
believe this is a "loss" worth discussing.

Cheers

[1] Good as in Windows XP good
[2] Lots of the Solaris stuff is on 5.8.4
[3] In fact I personally will always give priority to such work, simply 
    because I find it much much more interesting ;)