[sf-perl] Third party Perl rpms for enterprise Linux distros

[Paul Makepeace]

On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 23:20, Fred Moyer <fred at redhotpenguin.com> wrote:
> Imagine if we were working on a Python application, and used the
> system python binary for running applications.  Upgrades to the system
> python binary and associated modules would certainly wreak havoc on
> yum and the many other system level tools that use python.

Python has something call virtualenv,
http://www.virtualenv.org/en/latest/#what-it-does

"virtualenv is a tool to create isolated Python environments.

The basic problem being addressed is one of dependencies and versions,
and indirectly permissions. Imagine you have an application that needs
version 1 of LibFoo, but another application requires version 2. How
can you use both these applications? If you install everything into
/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages (or whatever your platform’s standard
location is), it’s easy to end up in a situation where you
unintentionally upgrade an application that shouldn’t be upgraded."

What's neat here is that it installs 'pip' too which is somewhat
equivalent to cpan shell.

Messing with the system perl is definitely a recipe for pain.

I agree with Michael F & think there's a lot to be said for using VMs.
If I look back at the hassle of getting my app dev setup working on my
Mac versus running VirtualBox & Ubuntu... Another nice aspect of VMs
is taking a snapshot, doing stuff to some database running on it, then
rolling back. This is usually quicker than doing a dump & restore!

Paul