[sf-perl] upgrade hell?

[Greg Lindahl]

On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 04:32:48PM -0700, George Hartzell wrote:
> Greg Lindahl writes:
>  > [...]
>  > Our next step is to start installing new systems which have a
>  > different system perl. [...]
> 
> Are you actually going to replace /usr/bin/perl (or where ever you OS
> puts its perl)?
> 
> Experience suggests that way lies madness, other things that the OS
> installs expect to get the perl they were shipped with.
> 
> Or are you planning to install /usr/sysadmin/bin/perl and manage it
> separately from search engine perl?

I agree that that way lies madness. We played with it and it was a
mess.

Talking only about our "sysperl" sysadmin scripts, what we do is use
unmodified /usr/bin/perl on each box. It's invoked in our scripts via
a wrapper /usr/bin/sysperl, which sets up everything to look for
modules in the right place. And these sysperl scripts are kept
compatible with multiple perl versions.

The search engine scripts have #!/usr/bin/env perl, but that never
expands to /usr/bin/perl. In hindsight we should have called it
ourperl or anything different from plain 'perl': then someone with an
incorrect/incomplete environment would get a pretty straightforward
error message.

-- greg