[Pdx-pm] red hat enterprise "perl" bug

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Tue Aug 26 09:21:28 PDT 2008


On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 08:17:38PM -0700, Eric Wilhelm wrote:
> If you happen to be using whatever redhat is calling "perl" lately and 
> haven't seen this yet...
> 
>   http://blog.vipul.net/2008/08/24/redhat-perl-what-a-tragedy/
> 
>   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=379791
> 
> I think Ask said it well:  "What is/was RedHat trying to fix with 
> whatever patch to Perl 5.8.8 that introduced this problem?"
> 
> This was open for almost 9 months?  Am I missing something?  Everyone 
> running rhel/centos just builds their own Perl, or all of the servers 
> are debian?  (BSD?)
...

I just posted a message about this to the Scientific Linux email
list;  the RHEL5 5.8.8 Perl also breaks Math::GSL .   If the
scientific community reacts as I hope it will, and Red Hat drags
their feet, the SL folk may be needing some help from the Perl
community to fork the distro to a sane version of Perl. 

The Scientific Linux distro that I run on all my machines is a
slightly forked version of RHEL, mostly with extra features for
large compute clusters.  There are two people at FermiLab working
full time to maintain SL, and a lot of large scientific sites
around the world running it.  This would be a good opportunity
to combine expertise and work together. 

Mostly, if the Perl community could figure out the answer to Eric's
question, and explain to the SL community what the impact of a fix
would be (plus and minus), and explain how to test it, then the SL
folks could propagate and maintain the fix.  It would be nice if
Red Hat would fix it, but I imagine they think of Perl as install
glue, and I would guess the patch fixes some important part of 
that, to hell with userspace runtime stuff.  Hell, there are not
even good tools to merge the RPM system with CPAN, AFAIK.

I can provide ssh access to one of my SL5.0 machines running the
suspect Perl to trusted individuals who want to experiment with this.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs


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