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The Long Slow Death of CGI.pm

posted by martyb on Saturday December 26 2015, @12:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the end-of-lifing-software-is-hard dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

CGI.pm has been removed from the core Perl distribution. From 5.22, it is no longer included in a standard Perl installation.

There are good technical reasons for this. CGI is a dying technology. In 2015, there are far better ways to write web applications in Perl. We don't want to be seen to encourage the use of a technology which no-one should be using.

This does lead to a small problem for us though. There are plenty of web hosting providers out there who don't have particularly strong Perl support. They will advertise that they support Perl, but that's just because they know that Perl comes as a standard part of the operating system that they run on their servers. They won't do anything to change their installation in any way. Neither you nor I would use a hosting company that works like that – but plenty of people do.

The problem comes when these companies start to deploy an operating system that includes Perl 5.22. All of a sudden, those companies will stop including CGI.pm on their servers. And while we don't want to encourage people to use CGI.pm (or, indeed, the CGI protocol itself) we need to accept that there are thousands of sites out there that have been happily using software based on CGI.pm for years and the owners of these sites will at some point change hosting providers or upgrade their service plan and end up on a server that has Perl 5.22 and doesn't have CGI.pm. And their software will break.

What say you, fellow Soylents? How would you suggest "end-of-life"ing CGI.bin?

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  • (Score: 1) by requerdanos on Saturday December 26 2015, @01:24PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 26 2015, @01:24PM (#281173) Journal

    requerdanos@aryth:/$ dpkg -l |grep ii\ \ perl\
    ii perl 5.20.2-6
    amd64 Larry Wall's Practical Extraction and Report Language
    requerdanos@aryth:/$ find -name CGI.bin
    requerdanos@aryth:/$

    Looks like "CGI.bin" is already "end-of-life"?

  • (Score: 1) by crb3 on Saturday December 26 2015, @03:22PM

    by crb3 (5919) on Saturday December 26 2015, @03:22PM (#281204)

    > If you upgrade to a new version of perl or if you rely on a system or vendor perl and get an updated version of perl through a system update, then you will have to install CGI.pm yourself with cpan/cpanm/a vendor package/manually. To make this a little easier the CGI::Fast module has been split into its own distribution, meaning you do not need access to a compiler to install CGI.pm

    -- https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/CGI/lib/CGI.pod#CGI.pm-HAS-BEEN-REMOVED-FROM-THE-PERL-CORE [metacpan.org]

    That's as it should be IMO: if you really want folks to avoid it, just make it non-default so it's incrementally harder to put it into use.

  • (Score: 2) by stderr on Saturday December 26 2015, @05:22PM

    by stderr (11) on Saturday December 26 2015, @05:22PM (#281225) Journal

    Looks like "CGI.bin" is already "end-of-life"?

    Have you tried looking for the right filename: CGI.pm?

    --
    alias sudo="echo make it yourself #" # ... and get off my lawn!

    • (Score: 2) by stderr on Saturday December 26 2015, @05:34PM

      by stderr (11) on Saturday December 26 2015, @05:34PM (#281230) Journal

      I now notice you were just pointing out that the summary got the filename wrong.
      Well, never mind me then...

      --
      alias sudo="echo make it yourself #" # ... and get off my lawn!