Include up to date languages

Our organisation uses perl extensively.

In the Perl community, RedHat has a terrible reputation.[1] for incorporating ancient versions of perl for "backwards compatibility".

The perl community has a 2 year release cycle, with the current and previous release being maintained (so 4 years total). New features are always included in such a way as to preserve backwards compaitibility.

Indeed, perl 5.10 in rhel6 is already abandoned by the perl community. Version 5.14 is the current stable version.

Cpan builds against the latest perl, perl core modules etc. So we find ourselves stuck with ancient modules.

Generalising this more. Other languages such as php, python etc are also left years behind.

As a customer, this significantly diminishes the value of our redhat subscriptions. Making other linuxs or unixes more attractive.

I would like to see a more pro-active approach to updating languages. Be that by updating them directly, providing through the 'alternatives' system (as is available on other linuxes) or providing parallel packages.

1. http://blogs.perl.org/users/anielsen/2010/10/rhel-and-perl.html