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This discussion has been archived.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: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday December 27 2015, @02:41AM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Sunday December 27 2015, @02:41AM (#281351) Homepage Journal

    What he said. We're straight up mod_perl. Much snazzier than CGI.pm.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by jdavidb on Sunday December 27 2015, @02:46AM

    by jdavidb (5690) on Sunday December 27 2015, @02:46AM (#281354) Homepage Journal
    From my point of view as a Perl programmer back in the day, the mod_perl stuff is heavy wizardry compared to CGI. :) I probably could have learned it, but never got around to it, so it has an air of mysticism to me.
    --
    ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings