Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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

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?

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 26 2015, @01:45PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 26 2015, @01:45PM (#281182)

    I was kinda thinking perl should be avoided since it is mainly write-only.

    Disclaimer: have not really used it much. (if at all)

  • (Score: 3, Touché) by isostatic on Saturday December 26 2015, @03:50PM

    by isostatic (365) on Saturday December 26 2015, @03:50PM (#281210) Journal

    Perl allows you to create write only shit. So does Python. And Java. And Bash. And whatever you hipsters use.