On Tue, 26 Aug 2008, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> 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.

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 11:39:41AM -0500, Connie Sieh wrote:
> 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.

I brought this up with the Portland perlmongers group (which seems
to include half the world's principal perlistas) and they agreed
with Connie;  two versions of Perl, because you never know what Perl
bugs and version hacks that critical system software is dependent on.

Now the raging discussion is about HOW to set up "application"
Perl (/opt/ ? /usr/local/bin/ ? ), how to mod the programs to
call the correct versions of Perl and libraries, and how to keep
things updated semi-automatically.  Since a "contrib" RPM seems
like the best way to share the update effort, perhaps we ought to
see if there is any consensus here on where to install, which Perl
version, etc., and figure out some way to make the security updates
track what TUV and SL are doing.  One of the reasons I love SL is
the excellently maintained updates, and a community of similar
users finding the bugs and learning the workarounds before I do.

Some perlmongers suggested that larger or critical Perl apps (living
in /opt/ ) should be paired with their very own optimized version of
Perl and modules, all updated together.  This makes sense, though
I don't expect to be doing that for my apps.   Apache, maybe.

Still, I wish TUV would get their Perl act together.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          [log in to unmask]         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
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