[72deluxe]

I had to upgrade a machine running an old version of Slackware on the 2.0 kernel. Yes, from about 1999 I think.

It was impossible to get that Perl web system running on anything modern without massive pain.

For the wonderful bliss of Linux-land, at least with Windows you know that something written 20 years ago will probably still work. (Yes, I know - they shouldn't have written it in Perl)

[draegtun]

If it had been written in some other scripting language then I'd guess you would have had even more issues upgrading! Because Perl, despite all its supposed warts & bad image, remains highly backward compatible.

NB. The biggest issues I've seen in upgrading are modules that use C libraries (unfortunately things do change over time!).

As an example I'm still running a Perl web system & data munging backend that I wrote back in 2001 with only minor tweaks over the years for new/modern systems.

[acqq]

Exactly. Perl 5 exists since 1994, so it's probably Perl 5 code there which needs probably little to no changes to run even today on the latest 5.x interpreter. I don't understand what were the issues that 72deluxe faced.

[72deluxe]

I think it was renamed modules between versions? I never got to the bottom of it. In fact, I aborted migrating it and ended up leaving it running, but instead virtualised the machine (that was fun!)

If I had known what I was doing with Perl, it might have been better. I was a bit harsh on Perl, apologies. But it still stands that migration on Linux boxes isn't massively easy or fun (not that Windows is either)