Our platform support policy states that we require "versions of
dependencies which are generally accepted as stable and supportable,
e.g., in line with the version used by other long-term-support
distributions". Of Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, and SLES, the four most common
distributions that provide LTS versions, the version with mainstream
long-term security support with the oldest Perl is 5.26.0 in SLES 15.6.
This is a major upgrade, since Perl 5.8.1, according to the Perl
documentation, was released in September of 2003. It brings a lot of
new features that we can choose to use, such as s///r to return the
modified string, the postderef functionality, and subroutine signatures,
although the latter was still considered experimental until 5.36.
This change was made with the following one-liner, which intentionally
excludes modifying the vendored modules we include to avoid conflicts: