Re: [interchange] Fix potential "use of uninitialized value" if called during startup

Jon Jensen <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.web.interchange.users
Message-ID <alpine.LFD.2.20.1706231127380.2475@cevzz>
On Fri, 23 Jun 2017, David Christensen wrote:

>> thanks very much on your effort to clean up Interchange!
>> 
>> I think the // operator isn't present in older Perls.
>
> I think 5.10 introduced this; I will change it to ‘’ as Peter suggested, 
> however practically speaking I’d expect anyone using IC at this point to 
> be on CentOS 7+ due to TLS issues, so we could probably safely increase 
> the minimum perl version in practice to the min(distributed version of 
> perl in CentOS 7, equivalent Debian TLS-supporting release).

David makes a good point: Because TLS 1.2 is required for PCI DSS, and 
because older Perl systems are built on older OS/distros with old OpenSSL, 
and because almost all Interchange usage is for ecommerce, it is probably 
a good time for us to consider raising the minimum Perl version. We have 
not done this for many years, so it's a good time anyway. We should 
increase the Interchange release to 5.12 to indicate the break in backward 
compatibility.

RHEL/CentOS 6 is the oldest supported in that family, and include TLS 1.2 
and Perl 5.14.1. RHEL/CentOS 7 comes with Perl 5.16.3.

Debian 7 is the oldest supported in its family, in its LTS phase. It came 
with Perl 5.14.2. Debian 8 comes with Perl 5.20.2, and 9 with 5.24.1.

Ubuntu 14.04 is the oldest supported, with Perl 5.18.2. Ubuntu 16.04 has 
5.22.1.

Based on the lowest common denominator of the above, I propose we increase 
the minimum Perl version to 5.14.1. That's still 6 years old, from 2011!

Pros of increasing the Perl version:

* build on a more current Perl + core module + CPAN module base, requiring 
fewer checks to see if a Perl module is installed

* be able to use "new" (since over 10 years ago!) features such as the // 
operator

* have more modern Unicode support

* reduce number of major versions we have to support / test on

Cons of increasing the Perl version:

* users wanting to stay on old versions won't be able to upgrade past 
5.10.x

What do the rest of you think?

Jon


-- 
Jon Jensen
End Point Corporation
https://www.endpoint.com/

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