The majority of buildfarm animals are not on the latest client code release. Version 8 was released more than 3 months ago. There are 26 animals on release 7 and 43 on even older releases, in one case on a release going back 4 years. See below for the lists of delinquents.
If this situation doesn't improve I'm going to have to reinstitute the server filters which will reject very old clients.
I do my best to keep things backwards compatible, so that usually an upgrade is simply a matter of unpacking the release and you're done. I don't think asking people to do that once every few months is terribly onerous. It's a five minute job.
It's very far from a 5 minute job on ancient Solaris boxes :-(
In my case, I've spent an hour or more trying to get Digest::SHA to install, and have failed miserably as it fails to compile for me with both Sun Studio and GCC. In the case of Sun Studio, CPAN seems insistent on trying to use the compiler in a way that makes it react like the crippled default compiler on the system, and it ignores variables like CC, and aliases and so-on, and insists on trying to run "cc" regardless. I'm going to have to give up for now.
