[Ottawa-pm] Repackaging Perl modules (was Wanted: 5 Perl Programmers)

[Dave O'Neill]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 03:27:05PM -0500, Michael P. Soulier wrote:
>On 25/02/11 Yanick Champoux said:
>>     Oh? I hit 'cpamn Mason' 2 minutes ago, and it's done for me.
>> But then, I guess that my Perl installation is a little bit more...
>> seeded than the average. :-)
>
> Try packaging it all into something like individual rpms for deployment across
> thousands of servers. It's no end of fun.

Packaging modules for redistribution as OS packages (RPMs or debs) 
wasn't so bad when we did it at Roaring Penguin, even when we were 
shipping a Catalyst-based web API.  It's annoying the first time, sure, 
but it's easily automated.  For a time we were building Solaris .pkg 
files, RPMS for multiple versions of Fedora, RHEL and SLES, and debs for 
multiple versions of Debian.

The biggest annoyance on Red Hat is that they retain ancient dual-lifed 
modules as part of the core perl RPM, making conflicts inevitable when 
you want to ship something that requires the newer one.  And they blame 
upstream Perl for shipping them with the base language when asked about 
it :(

Cheers,
Dave