[CentOS] PERL module woes

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2006-06-01 at 16:46 -0400, Kurt Hansen wrote:

> My experience is that I have to watch rpm installed stuff "like a hawk 
> for attempted funky behavior." :-)
> 
> It may be my own personal experience, but I've found CPAN easier to 
> control and watch than yum or up2date.

This just depends on the day you try it.  The CPAN modules are
maintained independently yet many depend on other modules maintained
by different people.  If you are lucky, everything you need will
work together that day.  Sometimes you just have to wait a while...

> Furthermore, for the stuff I do -- primarily Apache/mod_perl -- I've 
> found the rpms coming out of Red Hat a day late and a dollar short. 
> Either well behind mod_perl development or the perl not optimized for 
> mod_perl. (In fact, the quality of the perl-related rpms from Red Hat is 
> the main reason I'm not using RHEL and using CentOS.) Plus, I've found 
> it easier to understand what is going by using CPAN or compiling from 
> source for these items.

Agreed - the stock RPM packages have the opposite problem - often not
being recent enough for apps you want to run.  Sometimes you
can find where someone else has done the work of packaging the
set of modules you need in versions that work together.  For example,
RT (Request Tracker) needs a huge number of perl modules that
aren't included in Centos, but:
http://wiki.bestpractical.com/index.cgi?RPMInstall has a link for
a simple yum install that gets everything, including a current
mod_perl for you.

> But, this also could be inertia on my part. :-) CPAN was the easier 
> option when I got started on this a few years back.

Things are coming around - the fedora extras repository for FC5 also
has an RPM-packaged RT and all needed modules, so eventually there
is hope for a set of packaged modules that will be maintained
together.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com