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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 jamesbond on Saturday December 26 2015, @02:35PM

    by jamesbond (2383) on Saturday December 26 2015, @02:35PM (#281194)

    Yeah double negative typo, I know. Unfortunately I can't edit my post, but I'm glad you catch what I meant to say.

    I know CGI has all those downsides. It doesn't follow though, that *I* should be *prevented* from using it, if I want to - with me accepting all those downsides.

    Same reasons why nobody tries to remove discrete resistors from the shops. Because, it has its place. You won't put a discrete resistors in a production board the size of Raspi Zero. But you won't attempt to use a surface-mount resistor in breadboard too. Everything has its uses.

    So why makes life difficult for everybody by removing that choice? Perl is known for its versatility, there are many ways to do the same thing (even if it's inefficient). CGI is just one of those things. Why the sudden urge to remove that from its toolbox?

  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday December 26 2015, @05:25PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Saturday December 26 2015, @05:25PM (#281226) Journal
    Discrete resistors have gone up in price as demand has gone down, so it's a fairly good analogy. The problem is that the cost of maintaining all of the legacy CGI crap isn't been covered by the people using it. As long as people are willing to pay for resistors, it makes sense to keep making and selling them. The people who want CGI, however, are not the ones paying to maintain it. If a codebase is in active development, then moving it to FastCGI or similar is a tiny incremental cost. If it isn't, then the person responsible for it probably isn't willing to invest the time in maintaining CGI support in other things either.
    --
    sudo mod me up