

Perl Developers Actively Care About Backwards Compatibility - acqq
http://consttype.blogspot.com/2009/07/darkpan-matters.html

======
acqq
See also

<https://www.socialtext.net/perl5/index.cgi?history>

Perl 5 was released in 1994. The current production version of Perl is 5.12.
You can really consider Perl 5 as something very, very stable by now.

~~~
Goladus
The difficulty maintaining Perl comes from the large number of modules that
will only work with the perl version it was compiled with. A module might work
with any version 5.8 or later, but only one version at a time. So if you
upgrade perl on a system, you'll have to re-install the module from CPAN as
well.

~~~
chromatic
You mean XS modules, and any well-written XS module should be binary
compatible with any other point release. That is to say, if you compiled an XS
module against Perl 5.10, it should work unchanged with Perl 5.10.1.

------
talvisota
The article to which this one is a response, has exactly the opposite point of
view:

[http://perl-yarg.blogspot.com/2009/06/darkpan-schmarkpan-sto...](http://perl-
yarg.blogspot.com/2009/06/darkpan-schmarkpan-stop-meme.html)

As, to some extent, does a followup from another developer:

<http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/39228?from=rss>

I suggest an alternative title for this post: "Some Perl Developers Care About
Backwards Compatibility (While Some Don't Give A Hoot And Others Just Try To
Keep Up With Conflicting Needs)".

~~~
acqq
There's big difference: those who care actually develop Perl (like, they
maintain the C kernel of the language etc.), and those that don't just use
Perl and just make noise and are clueless outsiders looking for attention.

Edit: I don't count as outsiders or anything anybody who is a Perl contributor
and has his own opinion! Not everybody is supposed to have same opinion, and
even when people do cooperate it's a part of the process! My personal belief
is still that Perl 5 aged more gracefully than a lot of projects!

~~~
chromatic
That's... quite a claim. I'm hardly the only contributor to Perl 5 who thinks
that the obsession over backwards compatibility with an unknowable and
unmeasureable DarkPAN is unhealthy.

~~~
acqq
Oh, sorry! I wanted to refer _only_ to the guy who wrote the schmpan text who
apparently wasn't contributor but was making noise!

I immediately withdraw my claim and beg for forgiveness from everybody who
does contribute but have the opposite opinion!

~~~
jleader
nperez (author of the darkpan-schmarkpan post) may not be a contributor to p5p
(Perl core language developers' mailing list), but a quick glance at
<http://search.cpan.org/~nperez/> shows that he's contributed some interesting
code to the POE and Moose codebases. I think Rafael was a bit harsh in his
"Perl Developers Actively Care..." post when he seemingly dismissed the
opinions of anyone who doesn't contribute sufficiently good patches to p5p.

