[Grinnz]

You were reading between the lines, and the initial announcement was writing between them. But like I said, it is not feasible to maintain a LTS Perl 5 next to a fork of the interpreter. The actual proposal was only even to maintain Perl 5 for a few years before sunsetting it. CPAN would not have been compatible with Perl 7, it would require a separate ecosystem of code and installed libraries. The ideas sound nice but I don't think a lot of people would have been happy with how the details would have worked out. Most of the problems you're talking about are more a deficiency of perception and tooling, and these can be addressed without such drastic measures.

[kbenson]

> But like I said, it is not feasible to maintain a LTS Perl 5 next to a fork of the interpreter.

I know, but even if the Perl community didn't want to maintain it, it would be maintained. Some company would take that up and provide it (ActiveState maybe?), because there's a need for it and companies that would pay for it. That it would be maintained is all that really mattered to me, and there's no doubt in my mind that it would be.

> Most of the problems you're talking about are more a deficiency of perception and tooling, and these can be addressed without such drastic measures.

I'm not sure they can be. There's a decade of the past of evidence that they wouldn't be, even if it is theoretically possible. As soon as you make breaking changes, you would possibly lose a lot of corporate users because you force work on them where there wasn't previously, and that means deciding whether that time is better spent moving away from the aging language with an unsure future. Losing those users would gut what little was left of the community.

That's long been the catch-22 of Perl, and getting past that has long been the hardest problem facing the community, IMO.

[Grinnz]

> That it would be maintained is all that really mattered to me, and there's no doubt in my mind that it would be.

Nor mine, but because I know that Perl 7 would die as most of the maintainers stayed working on Perl 5. Or the worst case: too many leave Perl entirely to maintain either fork. Perhaps some corporations would take up the funding, but it is not a simple piece of software you can throw new developers at and expect progress; it's an enormous C program built on thousands of macros and decades of history, as anyone who has tried writing XS code probably sees in their nightmares.

> As soon as you make breaking changes,

I am referring specifically to doing it without breaking changes, as is the current plan, and the only option at this juncture.