This just in:

http://blog.vipul.net/2008/08/24/redhat-perl-what-a-tragedy/

Summary:  The Upstream Vendor version of Perl has a patch to the
"bless[]" function that makes it /extremely/ slow.  Most of us do
not write that kind of of fancy Perl, but a lot of us use one of
the 1500+ CPAN modules that do.  The slowdown can be over 100x 
with some programs.  This affects Fedora 9 as well as the various
version 5 distros.


TUV-patched Perl version 5.8.8 also breaks the Math::GSL package
that I wrote about a few days ago.  It runs fine with 5.10 .

What to do?  Some people are downloading and recompiling Perl;
we have version 5.8.8, while version 5.10 is available .  A few
are abandoning Perl.  A few are abandoning TUV-inspired distros.
A few are buying way more hardware than they would otherwise need.

Since some of the scientific community (especially the life sciences)
are running huge amounts of Perl, this is probably a Big Deal.  We
should explore the problem further with TUV and the CentOS community.
If a fix is not forthcoming from TUV, I reluctantly suggest that we
get together with the CentOS people and fork this portion of the
distro, perhaps standardizing on Perl 5.10 .  There are people
in the Perl community ready to assist us.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          [log in to unmask]         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs