Dropping 5.5.x

[Michael G Schwern]

Nicholas Clark wrote:
> Partly because I would like to provide some pressure on the world out there
> "stuck" on 5.6.whatever that they need to seriously think about moving on.
> They don't have to *do* anything. They just need to start thinking that
> they are getting left out in the cold, and whether they consider frostbite,
> or death by exposure, to be what they want happening in their near future.
> (Oh, and that if they do nothing, they don't have a distant future full stop)

+1

Part of the reason I dropped 5.5 was I was working in a 5.6 shop.  Their code
needed some work to upgrade to 5.8.  They were using 5.6 style Unicode.  They
had some code which depended on hash order.  A few other little things.  All
the developers knew this, but management never authorized the time to do it.
Why?  There was no "business reason" and the slow dribble of efficiency lost
from working with 5.6 was not quantifiable.

What sort of thing were they looking for?  When it was considered to port the
app to Japanese the improved Unicode support in 5.8 would have been enough,
but that never happened.

By dropping support for 5.5 I gave every developer stuck using 5.5 a reason to
upgrade.  They could tell their managers that their version of Perl is
unsupported and they have to upgrade.  Every time they tried to install a CPAN
module, it didn't work and they have to spend time patching it, that adds to
their argument.

We can do the same for 5.6.

(Unsurprisingly, they weren't heavy CPAN users and most of what they had was
wildly out of date)


-- 
But there's no sense crying over every mistake.
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.
    -- Jonathan Coulton, "Still Alive"