This post is promoting the Proc::UID library, which was apparently only a year old at the time and was not quite finished. The release on CPAN was marked "for testing and review purposes only. Please do not use in production code."
Yes, the author of Proc::UID discussed his module in public. That's not what I'm talking about here, I'm talking about the Ruby community's general love for cut-n-paste instead of actual library writing.
Anyway, compare planet perl and planet ruby some time. The Ruby posts are overwhelmingly "cut-n-paste this code" and the Perl posts are generally "here is a module I wrote". Different cultures.
a) making this mistake over and over for a decade
b) finally realizing, in the course of some blog posts or their equivalent, that they needed a library to fix it?
c) making that library?
Because here's what appears to be the Perl equivalent of this Ruby blog post, from 2005:
http://use.perl.org/comments.pl?cid=45240&sid=29890
This post is promoting the Proc::UID library, which was apparently only a year old at the time and was not quite finished. The release on CPAN was marked "for testing and review purposes only. Please do not use in production code."
http://search.cpan.org/~pjf/Proc-UID-0.04/UID.pm
The newer Privileges::Drop library, which you link to, dates back only to 2007.
Perl is more mature than Ruby. But perhaps only a few years more mature.