To anyone else considering Kwiki (an excellent minimal yet extensible Perl Wiki), make sure you're running a recent Perl. I spent far too long attempting to set it up under Perl 5.6.x recently only to discover that it was utterly painless under Perl 5.8.x.
I wish I had thought to try that hours earlier.
That concludes this public service announcement.
Posted by jzawodn at January 27, 2005 05:28 PM
In my opinion, there are two sweet spots in Perl release history, 5.5.3 and the current 5.8.6.
I have considered not even supporting Kwiki on any perl prior to 5.8.3.
As far as 5.5.3 is concerned, I supported this perl in my modules for years but now believe the time to do so has passed. Perl releases went through a dark age, but now we're back in good times.
The perl is dead, long live the Perl.
--BrianIngerson
{note: capitalizations of [Pp]erl intended.}
It's also quite vulnerable to spam, and not so easy to trackback when it happens.
For a long time I had pretty strong convictions about maintaining older versions of Perl (oops, I became pumpkin for 5.005) and that CPAN modules should be backwards-compatible with 5.6 and 5.005. But to be honest, 5.8 is just so darned nice these days (thanks Nicholas), and 5.6 is five years old. I guess my point of view right now is that you don't need the pain (there aren't that many users any more), go for the modern software instead.
Note that support for Unicode was rather tentative and in some areas botched, in 5.6. That alone should be reason enough to update to 5.8.1 or newer wherever the cost is affordable.
