Wither 5.4? (was Re: Tapping CPAN testers)

[Gabor Szabo]

On 9/18/07, Michael G Schwern <schwern at pobox.com> wrote:
> Gabor Szabo wrote:
> > On 9/18/07, Michael G Schwern <schwern at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> > I don't think we should be seeing this as "end-of-life".
>
> "End-of-life" means the vendors are no longer providing support and new
> versions, which we're not.

Yes, but if we see p5p or the perl community as the vendor then it has
not supported any of these old version for a long time. As I
understand the only
support is for 5.8.8 with people sometimes waking up and upgrading
some old version of perl mainly for fun.
If http://www.cpan.org/src/README.html can be an indication then it
only links to
5.8.8 and 5.9.5

> > So users of 5.4 won't be able to upgrade Test::Harness. Then what?
>
> Not being able to upgrade part of the module installation toolchain means as
> more and more modules rely on new features of the toolchain they will no
> longer being able to install modules.  This leads to a dependency failure
> cascade knocking out large chunks of CPAN.  For example, folks already need to
> upgrade to Test::Harness 2 for no_plan and TODO test support.
>
> MakeMaker already does not support 5.4, and I doubt either does Module::Build.
>  I'm considering pulling Test::More's 5.4 support next time I happen to break
> it.  So it's de-facto already happened.

Maybe it would be better solved in CPAN.pm ? It might be able to know
which is the latest version of every module that runs on a particular
version of perl (proved by having a successful test report for that
version) and install that?

Gabor