Why ... oh ... why ...

Dear Red Hat: You put out a good product in RHEL 6.x. Ignoring the (often massive) performance regressions, other things are better/more stable. Dracut, is growing on me. Actually liking being able to debug startup. But, this said … I have to inquire … Why on earth did you include an End-Of-Lifed version of Perl (5.10.x) in RHEL 6.x? What … exactly … was the thought process behind this? Have a look here: and search for “Latest releases in each branch”. I noticed it tonight when I was trying to install some Perl modules. Yes, I looked on EPEL and found HTML::Mason v1.42. Technically speaking, 1.42 wasn’t released … it sort of emerged from a repository pull, somewhere between 2005 and 2009? This isn’t your fault … the Perl modules packaged up as part of the main RHEL and supporting repos are woefully out of date. But the core distro has been EOLed for a while. Heck, we’ve been using a 5.12 based core for much of our /opt/scalable tree for a while, and that is EOLed (we are rolling to 5.16 now). Please … at some point in time … try to get this fixed … Not by removing Perl (still one of the most widely used languages out there), but by coming into the modern age of this language, and packaging up a recent version. This old stuff is a killer for modules with advanced features which just don’t work well with an ancient core. Imagine writing all your python with 1.5.4. Yeah, thats what we are going through here. So we’ll update our /opt/scalable tree to 5.16 in the next few days, and rebuild what we need. But, please … we can reuse more of your code/support if we could only get a modern Perl.