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Bitten By the Red Hat Perl Bug
snydeq writes "Smart coders always optimize the slowest thing. But what if 'the slowest thing' is the code supplied by your vendor? That was exactly the situation Vipul Ved Prakash discovered when he tinkered with a company Linux box on which Perl code was running at least 100 times slower than expected. The code, he found, was running on CentOS Linux, using Perl packages built by Red Hat. So Prakash got rid of the Perl executable that came with CentOS, compiled a new one from stock, and the bug disappeared. 'What's more disturbing,' McAllister writes, 'is that this Red Hat Perl performance issue is a known bug,' first documented in 2006 on Red Hat's own Bugzilla database. Folks affected by the current bug have two options: sit tight, or compile the Perl interpreter from source — effectively waiving your support contract. If a Linux vendor can't provide comprehensive maintenance and support for the open source software projects you depend on, McAllister asks, who ever will?"
It's a jump to conclusions mat!
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Except he *wasn't* paying for the support contract!
By definition if you are running CentOS, you are saying, "I'm so smart I don't need a support contract. If something goes wrong I'll fix it myself." And then he complains about getting bitten by the "Red Hat Perl Bug".
If Red Hat is so Horrible (And by extension CentOS), why is he running it? If vendor supplied component X is worthless, why isn't he running Gentoo? Oh, that's right, because having a stable platform is *valuable*. But, it would appear, not valuable enough to pay for.
Eventually, someone at experts-exchange.com gave me the answer to my problem.
You had me until then.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?