[CentOS] Pulling Hair Out - TWiki 4.2 on CentOS 5

[Les Mikesell]

MHR wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 5:11 AM, Chuck <chuck.carson at gmail.com> 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...
>>
> 
> If your distrust of Red Hat is so high, one has to wonder why you're
> using CentOS at all.

Depending on how far back you go, the approach may or may not be 
warranted.  If you used anything before RH7.3 you were pretty much 
forced to roll your own apache/perl to get a working mod_perl.  The 
stock version finally was built right in RH7.3, then broken again in 8.0 
until something much later, not sure if it was RHEL3 or 4 - or maybe it 
was broken different in each of those and fixed in updates.  As I recall 
the main symptom of the stock one was that it leaked memory whenever a 
perl page was updated, but there may have been other things wrong too.

> No insult or deprecation intended, it's just that there are many Linux
> options around, enough of them free.

I'm not sure if any of them got mod_perl right, and since 
apache/perl/CPAN are relatively easy to replace it wouldn't be worth 
switching for.

> Personally, I like the stability and reliability of CentOS (RHEL)
> enough to put up with any inconveniences I have found so far.
> Besides, the support on this list is sublime.

I have to agree - for several years there have been few surprises. 
However, many commonly needed perl modules aren't in the stock repo so 
if you use applications like twiki, RT, MimeDefang, etc. you were forced 
to use CPAN until Rpmforge and EPEL added them.  (And java stuff is even 
worse...).

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com