SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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?
(Score: 2) by ledow on Saturday December 26 2015, @01:56PM
I am by no means a zero-day technology enthusiast. I just got onboard with HTML5 after finding that Emscripten lets me bring old C99 programs to the web and that it can replace both Flash and Java, in effect.
But, hell, just kill it already. People don't take hints. Dragging technology support forward just results in insecure software on new platforms as well as old.
Just stop including it, let those people RESPONSIBLE for MANAGING their own businesses based on it work out what they should do. If they deliberately decide to carry on on old tech because it hurts too much to do anything else, that's their conscious decision. If they decide to abandon it and find something else, that's their decision. But pretending to slowly support for a number of years until something breaks accidentally while it's been insecure and deprecated all that time, that's something that they will just take to mean they can carry on as normal without making such decisions.
Deprecate it. Announce it. Carry on.
But, to be honest, I don't know anyone who's still deploying Perl tech, even on their websites. Everything is PHP these days. Why Soylent/Slash is still developed in Perl, I have no idea. One would have thought that IT sites like that could emulate their old style (after all, what code PRODUCES the HTML is neither here nor there) in something a bit more modern.
There's nothing "wrong" with Perl CGI any more than there's anything "wrong" with executing a PHP program to produce an HTML output. It's basically the same thing. Do it as limited users, with strict checking, and it's all the same.
But if you're going to get rid of it, do so. If people don't upgrade to Perl 6 PURELY because it has no CGI, you know exactly what your language is used for in the real world and what users want. If it passes silently into the night and people upgrade to Perl 6 and nothing catastrophic is ever mentioned, you know that it doesn't really matter.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday December 26 2015, @02:52PM
Basically its women's fashion, applied to tech. Why should anyone be permitted to wear bell bottoms, its current year. Any woman who cares switched to yoga pants a long time ago.
Stopping something that works is hard. People will just install it and it'll work great. If you want to sabotage you need to throw sand in the gears, actively include trojans and security holes. Thats the only way it'll work.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Saturday December 26 2015, @03:47PM
If you want to sabotage you need to throw sand in the gears, actively include trojans and security holes. Thats the only way it'll work.
Not even then; Microsoft tried that and there are still Windows XP holdouts despite their best efforts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 26 2015, @04:00PM
It will keep happening until something is done about the saboteurs.
They pervade positions of command authority in opensource now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 27 2015, @12:11AM
Why Soylent/Slash is still developed in Perl, I have no idea.
IMHO, Perl comes along for the ride because re-doing the whole thing in some other language *and* retaining familiar features would require too much time and/or money. Dice can't be counted on to do it without their sticky fingers getting in there and doing something evil. Soylent can't do it because... look at their fundraising goals and progress. That's just to maintain what we have.