[CentOS] Upgrading Perl (modules) / RequestTracker

Tue Feb 4 23:33:52 UTC 2014
Rainer Duffner <rainer at ultra-secure.de>

Am 04.02.2014 um 22:49 schrieb Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com>:

> I'm attempting to install RequestTracker on CentOS 6.5. Running "make
> testdeps" as recommended by RT's installation guide, I'm presented with
> lists of missing Perl modules.
> 
> One of these lines reads:
> 
>        Encode >= 2.39 ...MISSING
> 
> 
> Now, "yum whatprovides '*/Encode.pm' " informs me that that module is
> part of the core Perl distribution, and is installed on my system.
> Opening the file itself reveals:
> 
> # $Id: Encode.pm,v 2.35 2009/07/13 00:49:38 dankogai Exp $
> 
> so I know that I have version 2.35 of that module installed, and
> obviously that's < 2.39. So I need to get 2.39 installed.
> 
> What is the correct way to do this on CentOS? The last time I had to do
> anything like this, it was on a Debian box, I went through the process
> recommended by the guys in #perl, and was left with a broken system
> that was a real joy to piece back together…


I’m not sure about CentOS.
This guide:
http://binarynature.blogspot.pt/2013/05/install-request-tracker-4.html

suggest installing all the modules via CPAN (onto the original installation).

I don’t believe this is going to work very well, once it touches modules already part of the initial installation (as in your case).

Historically, you were best off with installing a perl from source into a different directory and using RT’s installer to fix all the dependencies.

You can then update these modules as needed or required by security-issues / RT updates/upgrades, without interfering with the base OS update mechanism.

If you choose this route, I would suggest using the NGINX+fast-cgi implementation, as you don’t have to worry about the mod_perl from base etc.

Admittedly, this reduces CentOS to little more than a kernel+filesystem+sshd - but unless you find a repository that provides all the modules (well over a hundred last time I counted, significantly more if you enable all the optional dependencies) in all the right versions, all of the time, you will have a hell of a problem keeping RT running smoothly.

I have no experience with Debian/Ubuntu, but I’d really only use packages in case I could package them up myself, specifically for this task.