[CentOS] PERL module woes

Fri Jun 2 13:10:31 UTC 2006
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Fri, 2006-06-02 at 03:19, Daniel de Kok wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-06-01 at 21:04 -0400, Kurt Hansen wrote:
> > This wasn't just a one-time thing, but happened several times from
> > RH7.X on up through FC2. This proved to me that Red Hat was unable
> > to support the components of their system that were most critical to
> > me.
> 
> These are products from the "consumer line" of the upstream vendor. For
> a fair judgment of their products, it is better to look at their
> enterprise offerings.

I think you are missing the point that there was one
version of mod_perl 1.x shipped as an update to RH7.3
that was actually usable. It was broken again in RH8
and subsequent versions including went into RHEL 3 and 4.
I think the 2.x version may finally be usable again in FC5
but I haven't really done stress testing.

> Besides that my experience is that they are very
> willing to fix bugs if you send good bug reports and/or patches. So, did
> you try an enterprise version, and if so, did you raise these issues to
> the upstream vendor?

The problem is that the 1.99x versions of mod_perl included in
the EL distros (and thus Centos) wasn't really release versions
and thus even if built properly aren't suitable for current
applications.  The 'upstream vendor' has a policy against
making behavior-changing updates so when you need a change
like this you are out of luck.

> > I was also concerned that Red Hat would balk at supporting other parts
> > of my systems if I had deviated from the supplied software. So, it
> > didn't seem I would be getting any value for my thousands.
> 
> Yeah. If you don't require the support, it is a shame to waste that
> money.

Centos is the answer to a lot of problems.  Just not this one
unless someone were to say, rebuild the fedora FC5 versions of
apache, perl, and mod_perl under Centos and put it in a yum
repository somewhere in a way that updates would push
through for people who want them.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
  lesmikesell at gmail.com