Re: Perl modules and perl upgrade
> According to Zephaniah E. Hull:
>> the upstream perl maintainers have proven that they will break
>> things on such 'minor' level version changes.
Chip Salzenberg <chip@perlsupport.com> writes:
> Um, could you please give an example of such breakage? We've been
> extraordinarily careful not to break existing code when updating
> Perl, and I'd hate to see our effort be discounted as a failure.
Sorry if this has already been answered, but is the intention to allow
5.005 and 5.004 to both be installed? Or is 5.005 going to conflict
with and replace the 5.004 version, as the old 5.005 packages did?
If 5.005 will replace 5.004 again, one thing to watch out for is
packages which have a Perl interpreter statically linked into them--in
particular mod_perl (libapache-mod-perl). (Are there any others?)
The problem is that such statically linked modules have a Perl include
path for a specific version of perl. If you installed the old 5.005
packages which were briefly on unstable, they moved some files around
(because of the new include path), causing some mod_perl scripts to
break (those scripts which depend on the moved files break).
So, in summary, we should do one or more of the following:
- Allow both 5.005 and 5.004 to be installed.
- Make mod_perl and any other packages with statically linked Perl
interpreters depend on a Perl package with a specific minor version.
- Instead, make mod_perl and any similar packages use a dynamically
linked Perl interpreter (but this option has performance
implications).
-ccwf
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