[Pdx-pm] [csieh at fnal.gov: Re: Horribly Broken RHEL5/SL5 Perl]

[Keith Lofstrom]

I spoke too soon.  Sigh, no distro support on this one.  OK,
for the complete Perl noob, how does one go about maintaining
two versions of Perl on a machine, one for "system" and one
for everything else including serving web pages?

Understandable, updated, robust and secure is good.  I fear
the only option is a large learning and maintenance burden.

Keith

----- Forwarded message from Connie Sieh <csieh at fnal.gov> -----

X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.2.5 (2008-06-10) on gate.kl-ic.com
X-Spam-Level: 
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-2.4 required=3.0 tests=AWL,RCVD_IN_DNSWL_MED
	autolearn=disabled version=3.2.5
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:39:41 -0500 (CDT)
From: Connie Sieh <csieh at fnal.gov>
Subject: Re: Horribly Broken RHEL5/SL5 Perl
In-reply-to: <0K67006QWTPV92 at mailgw2.fnal.gov>
To: keithl at keithl.com
Cc: SCIENTIFIC-LINUX-USERS at listserv.fnal.gov

On Tue, 26 Aug 2008, Keith Lofstrom wrote:

>This just in:
>
>http://blog.vipul.net/2008/08/24/redhat-perl-what-a-tragedy/
>
>Summary:  The Upstream Vendor version of Perl has a patch to the
>"bless[]" function that makes it /extremely/ slow.  Most of us do
>not write that kind of of fancy Perl, but a lot of us use one of
>the 1500+ CPAN modules that do.  The slowdown can be over 100x
>with some programs.  This affects Fedora 9 as well as the various
>version 5 distros.
>
>TUV-patched Perl version 5.8.8 also breaks the Math::GSL package
>that I wrote about a few days ago.  It runs fine with 5.10 .
>
>What to do?  Some people are downloading and recompiling Perl;
>we have version 5.8.8, while version 5.10 is available .  A few
>are abandoning Perl.  A few are abandoning TUV-inspired distros.
>A few are buying way more hardware than they would otherwise need.
>
>Since some of the scientific community (especially the life sciences)
>are running huge amounts of Perl, this is probably a Big Deal.  We
>should explore the problem further with TUV and the CentOS community.
>If a fix is not forthcoming from TUV, I reluctantly suggest that we
>get together with the CentOS people and fork this portion of the
>distro, perhaps standardizing on Perl 5.10 .  There are people
>in the Perl community ready to assist us.

There is merit in having your own "application" perl vs using the "system" 
perl for everything.  That way you can "decide" .

It is NOT a good idea to replace the "system" perl.

-Connie Sieh
>
>Keith
>
>


----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
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