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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: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday December 26 2015, @05:28PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Saturday December 26 2015, @05:28PM (#281228) Journal
    Your argument would have merit, if not for the fact that CGI also enforces a more difficult programming style. It now might make sense to burn some cycles in exchange for ease of programming, but it makes absolutely no sense to burn cycles in exchange for harder programming and that's what CGI offers.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 27 2015, @03:00AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 27 2015, @03:00AM (#281356)

    Suppose one is using/reusing old code.

    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday December 27 2015, @09:04AM

      by TheRaven (270) on Sunday December 27 2015, @09:04AM (#281405) Journal
      If you're using old code on the web without doing even basic security auditing... then expect complaints when your machine is used in a botnet to attack other people. If you're adapting it, then adapting CGI code to use FastCGI is usually a fairly trivial change.
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