Some facts/observations on *early adopter* perl use

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Some facts/observations on early adopter perl use

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From:

Peter Rabbitson

Date:

March 12, 2013 13:12

Subject:

Some facts/observations on *early adopter* perl use

Message ID:

20130312131233.GA13574@rabbit.us

Greetings!

I wanted to write this email early, while some of the assumptions I make 
below still hold. Please *do* nitpick what I write - if I am mistaken in 
any way I would love to know about it.

* Assumption 1:
 App::cpanminus on its own is an early adopter tool. It is extremely 
 unlikely it is used by "ossified environments" nor by "die hard perl 
 neckbeards". Whoever is using cpanminus can be reasonably assumed to be 
 a "modern perl" follower.

* Assumption 2:
 If we assume App::cpanminus an early adopter tool, then a *version 
 released 4 days ago* is something to be found in the toolbox of the 
 earliest of the earliest adopters. In other words the group running 
 latest cpanm today (March 12th) is a very representative slice of folks 
 who don't think twice about upgrading their dev environment.

* Fact 1:
 Miyagawa released a new version of cpanm 4 days ago. This release
 transmits the used perl version[1] while querieng for dist/module URLs.

* Fact 2:
 During these 4+ days some statistics have already been collected. Since 
 this is dynamic data I am including at the end of this email a snapshot 
 of the numbers as they were available on this site [2] at 2013-03-12 
 13:00 UTC. In particular the following numbers are interesting:

 Total ( $] < 5.017)     : 860 (100%)
 Requests with $] < 5.014: 475 (55%)
 Requests with $] < 5.012: 379 (44%)

Putting it together:

If my assumptions are correct, then 44% of the early adopters *today* 
are running a perl version which has been out of p5p support for a year. 
This number will jump to 55% in couple months if their environments do 
not change.

I am in no position to make a statement wrt the current p5p support 
policy. All I can say is that the numbers above make me uneasy when I 
mentally combine them with relentless PHBs.

Cheers!

[1] https://metacpan.org/diff/release/MIYAGAWA/App-cpanminus-1.6003/MIYAGAWA/App-cpanminus-1.6004#Changes
[2] http://cpanmetadb.plackperl.org/static/versions/index.html

[ '5.8.3', 7 ],
[ '5.8.4', 2 ],
[ '5.8.5', 6 ],
[ '5.8.6', 5 ],
[ '5.8.7', 20 ],
[ '5.8.8', 97 ],
[ '5.8.9', 8 ],
[ '5.10.0', 18 ],
[ '5.10.1', 216 ],
[ '5.12.1', 4 ],
[ '5.12.2', 3 ],
[ '5.12.3', 12 ],
[ '5.12.4', 72 ],
[ '5.12.5', 5 ],
[ '5.14.1', 6 ],
[ '5.14.2', 186 ],
[ '5.14.3', 16 ],
[ '5.14.4', 1 ],
[ '5.15.6', 2 ],
[ '5.16.0', 19 ],
[ '5.16.1', 33 ],
[ '5.16.2', 114 ],
[ '5.16.3', 8 ],
[ '5.17.4', 3 ],
[ '5.17.6', 1 ],
[ '5.17.10', 9 ]

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