Walt Reed wrote:
I have had ZERO issues over the past several years pointing /usr/bin/perl to /usr/local/bin/perl as the local perl is a superset of stock perl. Local scripts work fine.
if you really do have 50+ machines, surely a rpm'ised yum repo is going to save you much heartache ??? or is manually using cpan on each machine really all that much better ?
The problem is basically mirrored with PHP with many advanced applications requiring versions newer than the OS is bundled with.
the problem with php is a lot easier to address, and we try and do that via the centosplus repo, where we provide a newer php, not tested nearly as much as base is - and not nearly as long a lifeline as the base packages are - but we try and help.
we've also been working on seeing how we can get php-pear packages setup and sorted in a sane manner. Things should get a lot easier with CentOS5, when the php packaging policy changes a bit upstream, but for that, we shall see :)
one of the reasons that I mentioned the rpm issue ( w.r.t rpmdeps --perl format ), where rpm can look at and dep solve from installed perl modules is because this functionality is seen as critical in the future. Imagine, perl - python - ruby - php - apache - third party drivers - mysql - etc etc, all of them with thier own install and management process ( not unlike CPAN is for perl )....
it _IS_ going to come, but its not here yet. And to be honest, end of the day, its a free world. Every systemadmin has his/her right to do as they choose, its their system and how they manage it is, well, upto them. And we are all just expressing opinion here. If you can take centos and stretch it in any manner you like to make it more usable by you - hey, more power to you.