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

[Kevin M. Goess]

On May 11, 2011, at 1:37 PM, Fred Moyer wrote:

> A repeating theme that I have been seeing with enterprise scale perl
> applications is that deploying rpm based versions of Perl modules in
> production environments has several problems that seem to remain
> unsolved.

I would say an enterprise scale perl application shouldn't depend on the system Perl libraries at all, it should install the versions it depends on in its own location using the same mechanism that the application itself is installed by.  Because otherwise, yes, if the OS decides to upgrade Foo::Bar to something that's incompatible with your app, then you're screwed.  Same as if your app upgrades Foo::Bar to something that's incompatible with an OS application.  You have to keep them separate.

Yes, it is more work, but at the scale of "enterprise" it's a drop in the bucket, and the payoff is worth it.

cpan2rpm is very helpful if you're in the land of RedHat/Centos.

You don't *necessarily* need a non-system perl binary to do that.  You can add /my/application/libraries onto the end of PERL5LIB or use local::lib or whatever.  But an enterprise-scale application should really be able to spare the resources to build and maintain its own Perl.


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Kevin M. Goess
(and Anne and Frank)
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