On 6/1/06, Kurt Hansen khansen@charityweb.net wrote:
Jim Perrin wrote:
In fact, the quality of the perl-related rpms from Red Hat is the main reason I'm not using RHEL and using CentOS
Is this the kind of rhetoric that is acceptable on this list? There is no value to your comment except to insult.
Actually, I was questioning the validity of that statement since RHEL and centos are built from identical sources. Theoretically you should have the same problem with CentOS that you do with RHEL. If something is different, I'm sure the other admins would be interested in hearing about it as well, since we are trying to be as compatible with RHEL as possible. Forgive me for trying to work a little humor (at your expense) into the day.
As others have pointed out mod_perl has been kindly supplied via a 3rd party repository, and I do agree that in very rare instances cpan is useful. However, for rpmbased distributions, as much software as humanly possible should be installed via rpm. This allows for easier administration, software auditing, replication and portability of packages, and in the event of failure.... blame, since the packages tell you who built them and when.
As others in this thread pointed out, CPAN is a moving target and poses a level of risk as such. Packages installed via rpm (while maybe not perfect) do not suffer from this affliction, are portable, predictable, and can be identically duplicated across as many machines as needed, even months down the road. The entire original meaning of my post was to be careful, and only use cpan as a last resort on rpm based systems. That point stands.