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Postings from March 2000
Re: 5.6.0 ready for prime-time?
From:
David Grove
Date:
March 31, 2000 20:06
Subject:
Re: 5.6.0 ready for prime-time?
Message ID:
005801bf9b8f$b38cc900$0700a8c0@panther
I, for one, am advising my users and readers to avoid 5.6 at this time.
Although it does compile on Win32 right now, it does not do so and remain
stable for long. It does fail tests, and from what I'm seeing the most
important modules to Win32 users are not ready for 5.6 internals and
therefore do not compile. Since I don't make it my business to meddle in the
internals of add-on modules, 5.6 is not usable to Win32 users at this time
who need more than core perl, which itself is very questionable.
As for why it was released early I have no idea, but wouldn't mind seeing
this thread following to fruition. I am seeing companies and groups deny
pressuring Sarathy for an early release. This is quickly becoming an
_embarrassment_ to this group and the Perl community, and there seems no
reason to doubt that this will worsen in a very short time. I also suspect
that the culprit will emerge shortly as well.
There was also no warning that I've seen that 5.6 was an early beta, or
early-beta-ish, though that's certainly where it's stands. The Win32
community is convinced that 5.6 is out, stable, and available only from one
source. The only company I see making a big deal out of this is ActiveState,
and in their defence (surprise surprise) I don't see any logical reason why
they would cut their own throats by hurrying something that just wasn't
ready for release. I've tested AS's release with the precompiled modules
available from them, and am seeing all of the troubles that I'm finding in
my independent release.
IS Perl 5.6 considered stable?
I would also qualify "stable" with the stability of the more popular
modules, Tk, LibWin32, LibWWW, LibNet, GD, DB_File, and other biggies, many
of which do not compile at all with 5.6 without "relatively minor tweaking".
Without these modules, Perl is not Perl. I am at the dawn of the first
official release of CodeMagic, Perl's only world-class editor at this time
soon to go cross-platform, which depends on a stable Perl as a backbone: and
after officially declaring 5.6 ready, this group is now wondering why it was
released at all so quickly? I have user who are going to question this, and
I don't have an answer for them.
David Grove
pete@petes-place.com