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

[Yanick Champoux]

> RedHat/CentOS stays with ancient versions of everything 'cause it's the devil
> they know. I'm still working with Perl 5.8.

     Could be worse. I had to hack a wee bit in Perl 4 last year. No, 
seriously, I did. I felt like Indiana Jones and the Codebase of Doom.

     Anyway, regarding the pains of massive deployment, the path I took 
is following the precept of Sun Tzu "The only battle you're ensured to 
win is the battle you avoid".  Unless eldritch requirements force me to 
use it, I leave the system's perl alone -- to the everlasting glee of 
sysadmins -- and build my own with perlbrew [1] .  That way it can be 
easily be packaged and distributed (using tarballs, git pushes, rsync, 
very fast typists, etc) without having a worry of impacting anything 
else, or clash with the local package manager.  So far, it's a method 
that is serving me superlatively well.

[1] http://babyl.dyndns.org/techblog/entry/guerilla-perl-installations


Cheers,
`/anick