Perl 5.8.x Vs 5.10+

[Mike Hughes]

There appears to be an increase in the number of people having problems with perl incompatibility as a result of their servers using perl 5.10+ (including 5.12 etc)

As I understand it, 5.8.9 is the final version of the 5.8 series and all new bugfixes, improvements, etc are being implemented on perl 5.10 (perl 5.12, etc).

So far this hasn't affected me and most of those with problems appear to be on windows servers, but I can't help suspecting that at some point UNIX servers are likely start moving over to the newer versions of perl.

I wouldn't want to have to move away from my current host (1and1) if they ever do make the move to perl 5.10. Is this something we ought to be concerned about or is it unlikely to happen? And are Actinic planning to make the scripts compatible with the newer version of perl or is it unnecessary?

Mike

[Darren B]

This is a good question Mike, having read two threads it seems there are issues somewere and perhaps Actinic indeed needs to be made future proof in respect of perl updates

[NormanRouxel]

I'm using Perl 10.0.1 and do not see the problem.

The KB article http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=44811 suggests that the failure may be seen on pages using a single add to cart button when more than one item from that page is added to the basket.

I just tested such a page (Recordable CDs page on a demo site) and it's fine on my 10.0.1.

However I note the infuriatingly vague "may" in the KB article. It would be much better to have definite failure scenario so that we can be sure it's happening or not.

[Mike Hughes]

I seem to remember seeing that one of the failures only showed when Paypal was enabled. It suggests there are just some lines of code that are incompatible rather than the perl scripts as a whole. Although I also think I saw a perl hack that fixed this problem so it may (or may not) have been a different problem.

I would just feel happier if we knew what the problem was with perl 5.10. and there was a public statement about what needs to be done moving forward.

Mike

[NormanRouxel]

I've now installed perl 5, version 12, subversion 2 (v5.12.2) built for MSWin32-x64-multi-thread (on Windows 7 Pro 64 bit) and can still use single add to cart. Don't see any other problems either.

[swardell]

Hi,

While not wanting to confuse the issue here I thought it important to say that this is something we have been discussing and investigating for a little while.

Our KB article about PERL 5.10 was based on field reported issues to do with pages using a single add to cart button, in fact this also manifested itself in PERL 5.8.8 on our Red Hat Servers. The reasons for that I will try to explain a little which hopefully will also help illustrate the annoying complexity of the issue.

Firstly let me say the issue we found with 5.10 was in fact something we were able to develop a work around for in our own PERL code, I wont say we had a bug as the code wasn't doing anything it shouldn't, nor had any previous version of PERL objected to it. But 5.10, or rather a fix in 5.10 did object. I think that fix was also back ported as part of a related security patch by Red Hat into their PERL 5.8.8 and here we begin to unravel part of the complexity of the issue.

Currently we think 5.10 is ok, we have been testing it and have not found any issues so far, but we have not performed the kind of testing our QA manager wants to, so we are not ready to issue the 'definitive statement' just yet. The workaround we made for single add to cart wasn't fixed in all older versions of EC, though the fix may be applicable.

PERL is typically provided with a linux OS by the OS vendor, this may be a native PERL, it maybe the latest, it may be older, it may be modified by the OS vendor. With Windows no PERL is provided at all, you must obtain it separately, via cPAN or ActiveState or even compiling source.

If you take the number and variants of OS, vendor and PERL versions you can end up with an impossible task to test. Thankfully PERL is a well established coding language so major problems are very very rare. Its also a fact that Actinic's use of PERL remains compatible across a wide range of PERL versions, as findings in this thread testify.

At this point our broad goal is to carry out the depth of testing required on PERL 5.10 and as time permits newer versions. Its worth noting that Red Hat, whose linux we ourselves use on our hosting has recently just released their Enterprise linux 6, this contains PERL 5.10. The latest PERL available from perl.org is 5.12.2

We expect to have a revised 'requirements' page when we have concluded our testing.

I would invite Community members to contribute their own findings, as you have been doing here, it will be a great help to other Community members to know that 1and1 VPS Hosting uses PERL x.y.z and works fine with Actinic v9 (for a made up example)

regards
Steve

[Darren B]

OK

Self Hosting
Windows server 2008 RC2
Perl version 5.10.1
Actinic V10.1
currently no payment processors to test with but will update when i do



Darren