On Tue, 26 Aug 2008, Keith Lofstrom wrote:

> 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.

There is merit in having your own "application" perl vs using the "system" 
perl for everything.  That way you can "decide" .

It is NOT a good idea to replace the "system" perl.

-Connie Sieh
>
> Keith
>
>