Dropping Archive::Tar::Wrapper support for Solaris

I recently adopt a Perl distribution: Archive::Tar::Wrapper.

Initially developed by Mike Schilli, this module is well know by the Perl community and it is being around since 2005. All started because I submitted a patch to Mike to make it work on OpenBSD.

From there, I tried to fix another known bugs (and introduced some!) and make it run on operational systems that were showing problems.

After fixing the distribution to run on MS Windows properly (with the help of Ingram Braun), the next step would be to fix it for Solaris. Carlos Guevara gave me some pointers and I decided to take a look.

First thing I thought was try to use a VM for it, of course. Vagrant VM's should be easier to use, and I was able to find one with, I think, a decent recent version.

That's is what I got after booting and logging in a shell:

Last login: Wed Jul 18 16:25:27 2018 from 10.0.2.2
Oracle Corporation      SunOS 5.11      11.3    September 2015
-bash-4.1$ perl -v

This is perl 5, version 12, subversion 5 (v5.12.5) built for i86pc-solaris-64int
(with 7 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)

Copyright 1987-2012, Larry Wall

Perl may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License or the
GNU General Public License, which may be found in the Perl 5 source kit.

Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists, should be found on
this system using "man perl" or "perldoc perl".  If you have access to the
Internet, point your browser at http://www.perl.org/, the Perl Home Page.

Oh, come on! perl 5.12?!? Really?

That gave me some thoughts about how old Perl 5.12 is and how little Oracle cares about Perl.

And brought back memories about the time I spent over there, when I was able to see that Perl was used everywhere inside the company, from day-to-day automation to specifically helping their own products. I was even able to find that in the past (and I don't remember how long it lasted) there was a group of people specialized in using Perl to automate anything, or even develop web applications using Catalyst. I wasn't able to contact any member of the group about that time.

Not long after that, I got a blog entry from Perl Weekly about a new release of DBD::Oracle. To my surprise, even after many years Oracle still makes the life of Perl programmers unnecessary miserable when they just need to connect their code to a Oracle database and have to do all sorts of configurations to just install a Perl module due binary dependencies.

Long story short: I gave up trying to support Solaris. Just put

if ( $^O eq 'solaris' ) {
    die "OS unsupported\n";
}

in the Makefile.PL and life goes on.

I won't reject a patch to make Archive::Tar::Wrapper on Solaris, as long it passes on the unit tests and don't break on other OSes, but from my perspective, the Perl community doesn't really need anything from Oracle.

I have the utmost respect about Sun Microsystems and all the contributions it gave to the community but for Oracle? Not really. At all.