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

[Todd Rinaldo]

> On Feb 6, 2020, at 3:49 PM, James E Keenan <jkeenan at pobox.com> wrote:
> 
> 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?

Linux. The reference to DLL hell I think was an analogy.

> 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?
> 

We build cpanel-perl on centos 6,7,8 and they work reliably with very little exception. I think there are 2-3 rpms we could not build on centos 8 and that was because the deprecated library was actually dropped from centos 8.

You can see all the built rpms here: http://httpupdate.cpanel.net/RPM/11.86/centos/8/x86_64/ <http://httpupdate.cpanel.net/RPM/11.86/centos/8/x86_64/>
the src.rpm files are here http://httpupdate.cpanel.net/RPM/11.86/src/ <http://httpupdate.cpanel.net/RPM/11.86/src/>


> 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.

CentOS just takes the redhat src.rpm files and rebuilds them without the redhat branding. Yes there's a lag although that has been reduced as of RHEL 8. 

Good luck
Todd Rinaldo

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.pm.org/pipermail/toronto-pm/attachments/20200206/d2dd8b1e/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 3905 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://mail.pm.org/pipermail/toronto-pm/attachments/20200206/d2dd8b1e/attachment-0001.bin>