[tpm] [Fwd: Perl and putative DLL Hell]

[James E Keenan]

On 2/6/20 3:07 PM, arocker at Vex.Net wrote:
> 
> I can'thelp with this, being seriously out of contact for another month.
> Can anyone offer help/advice/suggestions?
> 
> ---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
> Subject: Perl and putative DLL Hell
> From:    "Dave Collier-Brown" <Dave.Collier-Brown at indexexchange.com>
> Date:    Thu, February 6, 2020 10:05 am
> To:      "Alan Rocker" <arocker at vex.net>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> We have an "interesting" problem with perl on Centos 7 and 8. One of my
> colleagues, Jourdain Casale  wrote:
> 
> Okay well if 7 is easier we are doing it first and Perl / CPAN / Linux
> dependencies are really bad migrating to 8
> 6 is ancient a lot of CPAN won’t build in 8
> Modules work great but only on the Linux they were built for
> A lot of refactoring and risk in 8 vs 7
> 
> Jourdain Casale  9:47 AM
> It’s dependency hell
> Like the Linux Perl equivalents of DLL Hell in windows
> 
> We're running Centos 6, and I'd like us to go forward to 8 (8.1, actually)
> but the teams who tried out updating the perl found it really hard on 8,
> and hard enough on 7 that they put it off again and again.
> 
> If it's really as hard as they thought, I figure you've heard the
> community talking a lot about it.  I do see some blathering via a google
> search, but nothing as severe as was being reported to Jourdain.
> 
> Can you help?
> 
> --dave
> _______________________________________________

I find the report very confusing.  Centos is the "community fork" of 
RedHat Enterprise Linux, is it not?  And "DLL" presumably refers to 
'.dll' files in Windows -- correct?  So which platform is he talking about?

Is the problem that applications that include Perl that were running on 
Centos version 6 are having problems running on Centos 7 and/or 8.1? 
Can the reporter provide any specifics as to what Perl problems he is 
encountering on either OS, i.e., perl versions, CPAN module versions?

Now, it so happens that last night at NYC BSD User Group, people got 
into an explanation of the relationship among Fedora (described as the 
open source bleeding edge of RedHat Linux development), RHEL (the 
corporate supported product which is frozen version of Fedora issued 
only once every several years -- and which is therefore always pretty 
much behind development versions) and Centos (community fork, de-branded 
of RHEL).  Implication (assuming all the details are true) is that 
Centos is always going to be behind the times; hence, any upgrade is 
going to be painful -- regardless of whether you're using Perl or 
anything else.

jimk