Someone needs to take jwz aside...

[Bill Crawford]

On 20 April 2011 12:12, Abigail <abigail at abigail.be> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 12:06:27PM +0100, Bill Crawford wrote:

>> It is frustrating to try to get a recent version of anything at all
>> onto a server that's destined to sit in a data centre for five years,
>> and needs to have a relatively stable install so it won't randomly
>> break ...

> I don't get this.
>
> If it's supposed to be relatively stable, you shouldn't install new
> things, and there's no need to put something recent of anything at
> all on it.

Except when there's a bug fix or a new feature in SQL::Abstract or
DBIx::Class or the Catalyst runtime (like assigning '' to
$c->response->body not having the desired effect, or the session
plugin ignoring specified timeouts, or whatever) that you want to
have, but it's not been updated on $PlatformOfChoice, ...

> Or you install new things, which may need an upgrade of other stuff,
> but if you're installing new stuff the environment isn't relatively
> stable.

If you are able to build one or two .deb packages of needed modules,
and install them, and they stay the same for years ... that's still
relatively stable.

If (as recently happened) you discover a dependency chain that leads
to CPAN complaining that you need a newer perl because it's a core
module ... it gets extra annoying.

> Abigail

Will