[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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