Reasons to upgrade to latest version of Perl

[Mothra]

Can anyone give me some good reasons to upgrade Perl to the lastest
stable release? Apart from it being the latest stable release?
Unfortunately that one doesn't seem to impress managers enough to
upgrade from 5.005_03.

 

[Sherm Pendley]

Can anyone give me some good reasons to upgrade Perl to the lastest
stable release? Apart from it being the latest stable release?
Unfortunately that one doesn't seem to impress managers enough to
upgrade from 5.005_03.

Look through the perldelta doc pages. Those list what's changed with each
new version. Look for bugs fixed, security holes patched, and optimizations
that actually affect your production code. Look for new features that would
simplify your planned future development efforts.

After all is said and done, you might find that no bugs are biting you, no
known security holes are open, no optimizations have been done that will
let you squeeze another year or two out of your hardware, and no major
changes are planned that couldn't be done just as well with the version you
have.

What do you do if that's the case? Simple - nothing. If it ain't broke,
don't fix it. This might be why your managers are reluctant. If they've
been around the block a time or two, they've probably been burned by the
"ooh, shiny" impulse, and learned the hard way that newer isn't always
better.

sherm--

 

[Paul Lalli]

Can anyone give me some good reasons to upgrade Perl to the lastest
stable release? Apart from it being the latest stable release?
Unfortunately that one doesn't seem to impress managers enough to
upgrade from 5.005_03.

In addition to the other comments you've received in this thread, there's
a FAQ on this topic that you might want to read:

perldoc -q convince


Paul Lalli

 

[ctcgag]

Can anyone give me some good reasons to upgrade Perl to the lastest
stable release?

Eventually you will want to upgrade your server hardware, which will
probably mean an OS upgrade, which will probably come with a newer Perl.
It is often troublesome to upgrade 3 things simultaneously, as you don't
know which one to blame any particular problem on. So beat them to the
punch by upgrading perl first.

Apart from it being the latest stable release?
Unfortunately that one doesn't seem to impress managers enough to
upgrade from 5.005_03.

Well, what do you use Perl for? Are you writing a lot of new code or just
maintaining old code?

I've noticed that Perl 5.005 hashing algorithm was much more likely than
later versions to degenerate into a linked list when used on IDs with
built-in check sums.

Xho

 

[Andrew DeFaria]

Can anyone give me some good reasons to upgrade Perl to the lastest
stable release? Apart from it being the latest stable release?
Unfortunately that one doesn't seem to impress managers enough to
upgrade from 5.005_03.

In a word - support! You always want the latest stable release because it'll
be the best supported (most widely used, etc, etc). If you're managers still
think that that is not a good enough reason then you need new managers!