Chuck wrote:
Once I build a system and bring it to our defined baseline, I rarely use rpm from that point forward...I custom roll almost everything -- especially apache. (red hat's layout makes my skin crawl) When did CPAN become so bad? It was the defacto standard and source of truth for perl modules 10 years ago. I trust CPAN over any rpm provided by red hat. Maybe things have changed, it has been several years since I got down and dirty with perl modules...
It isn't that CPAN is bad - after all, that's where the packaged verisions originate too. It is that module features and dependencies change over time and you need a consistent snapshot to work together. When you install an RPM package it keeps the version and dependencies in the RPM database and won't make changes that break any dependencies. When you install via CPAN it sort-of figures things out during the install but only for the perl portions and doesn't update your RPM database so a subsequent 'yum update' will happily overwrite your CPAN installed modules with something much older (just newer than the previous RPM). If some other module needed the newer features, things are now mysteriously broken. The fact that you can get away with this at all indicates how compatible how backwards-compatible they try to keep things in perl, but once in a while - ikely in the long lifespan of Centos - there are some changes that will break things.