[ic] RHEL/CentOS 5 unthreaded local Perl & CPAN RPMs

Jon Jensen jon at endpoint.com
Fri Aug 22 18:50:21 UTC 2008


Interchange RHEL/CentOS 5 users,

There's been lots of discussion over the years about the problems caused 
by Red Hat (and Debian) shipping a threaded Perl, and Interchange users 
needing an unthreaded one.

Building Perl from source isn't hard, and installing CPAN modules from 
source isn't hard either, but there are various problems that come with 
doing so:

* It takes time and manual intervention to build.

* Who knows what version of CPAN modules you'll end up with, and whether 
they'll work with your code?

* Surprise test failures at the least convenient times.

* Difficult to track dependencies fully.

* A pain to automate.

My colleague, Kiel Christofferson, has recently spent a lot of time 
putting together a custom-built set of RPM packages for RHEL 5 x86_64 that 
are completely unrelated to Red Hat's system Perl. They're called 
local-perl-*, go in /usr/local, the Perl is unthreaded version 5.10.0, the 
CPAN modules are all current (except for a few that were pegged at older 
versions for library compatibility). Some of our regular needs such as 
Moose, Rose::DB::Object, Image::Magick, GD, the old SQL::Statement, 
Test::WWW::Mechanize, Bundle::LWP, and many more, are there.

We've just begun using these but are finding them reliable and very 
helpful so far.

Any of you who would like to are welcome to try them out via direct 
download, or much easier, adding our Yum repository to your system as 
described here:

https://packages.endpoint.com/

Once you've done that, a simple command should get you most of the way 
there:

yum install local-perl-Bundle-InterchangeKitchenSink

PLEASE NOTE: If you have any existing /usr/local Perl, these RPMs WILL 
OVERWRITE IT WITHOUT WARNING. The RPM system only warns about overwriting 
other RPM-installed files, not files that aren't in the RPM database. You 
have been warned, and we are not responsible if you mess up your system.

I look forward to any feedback you have. This package repo is for us and 
our clients primarily, but if there's a package you need that isn't in 
there, let me know and maybe we'll add it. At the moment we're only fully 
supporting RHEL 5 x86_64, but we may fill out the i386 packages someday as 
well.

Also, there are some other useful packages in there such as Git built for 
RHEL 5, with a custom git-emacs package for emacs Git support. (But emacs 
is still an inferior editor to Vim, so don't use it. :)

Finally, many thanks to Dag Wieers (freshrpms/rpmforge/CentOS) and Erick 
Calder (cpan2rpm) for their packaging work that we built on.

Jon

-- 
Jon Jensen
End Point Corporation
http://www.endpoint.com/



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