MailScanner, CentOS 5 and perl-IO & perl-File-Temp

[Julian Field]

On 7/4/09 16:31, Kai Schaetzl wrote:
> Julian Field wrote on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 19:52:56 +0100:
>
>    
>> That sounds ancient. If you check the ChangeLog on search.cpan.org I
>> think you will find a whole host of bugs fixed since that version.
>>      
> Who says that the important fixes are not in that version? The point about
> enterprise distributions is that you keep a reliable system for a long
> time that also gets security and serious bug fixes over this time.
>
> What you are doing with your install script is about the same you did 5 or
> more years ago. It may have been necessary back then. Nowadays the major
> distributions are equipped with decent Perl support and with a slew of the
> most important modules. And most other modules are usually available as
> rpms from an external repository that specializes in that distribution.
> Forcing rpms on top of the existing perl installation and included modules
> is definitely something that one should not do. And it's easily avoidable.
>    
This is only partially true. Quite a few of the modules do not "force 
install" on RHEL5 or CentOS 5 systems. One of the big problems is that 
there are many Perl modules where the Makefile.PL tells it to install in 
the core tree rather than the vendor or site trees. If the module 
attempts to install in the core tree, there is no alternative in the RPM 
built from that to "force install" it. This is true of quite a few 
different Perl modules. So if you build from CPAN you never see this. 
What do rpmforge and the like do about this problem?

Examples of this are bignum, File-Temp and IO, though there are others too.

You can see them in the big table of modules in the MailScanner RPM 
install.sh script in the last column in the lines. This is the "FORCE5" 
parameter where a "yes" makes it do a "force install" on RHEL5/CentOS5 
systems.


> I've been using MailScanner now for more than 5 years, Julian. Have you
> seen any perl or installation related problems posted by me? I'm rarely
> having any problem. This is due to your superb work and because I'm very
> careful about what and how I put it on my machines. My MailScanners work
> fine and my perl works fine, too. Without forcing any newer modules over
> the ones coming with the distribution.
>    
I would like to see an answer to my question above before saying much more.

Jules

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