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Apple's Mac OS X Update Breaks Perl
mir writes "It looks like if you use CPAN to install modules, Apple's latest security update might just have broken your Perl. According to Tatsuhiko Miyagawa 'The Security Update brings (old) IO.bundle with version 1.22 but your IO.pm has been updated to the latest 1.23 on CPAN shell. (But hey, 1.23 was released in 2006...Why do you bring that ancient version back, Apple!?)'."
"It just works"
Why are Apple's updater and Perl's CPAN shell both trying to update the same file? If the file's there as part of the Apple OS then only the OS's package manager should touch it, and Perl should leave it alone (installing its own version in /usr/local if necessary). It's exactly the same on Linux distributions: the CPAN shell doesn't try to mess with the system perl which is updated using rpm or dpkg.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The real question is (or ought to be), why is the 1-digit difference in the minor version number break things? If the 1.22 -> 1.23 change was important (as in interface-changing or something), shouldn't the new version have been named 1.3 or even 2.0?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Umm, what about Fink?
http://www.finkproject.org/
Or MacPorts, formerly DarwinPorts: http://macports.org/
Wes
All part of Apple's plan to ensure that no one can ever use a Mac for gaming.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
CPAN is the closest thing to DLL hell on Unix systems. Modules are updated willy-nilly. No attempt is made to preserve compatibility between versions, or between modules and their dependencies. A company I used to work for had to totally abandon a large program because it was impossible to keep it working in the face of CPAN-driven upgrades, even if they did manage to get it installed the first time (by totally bypassing CPAN).
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Right. Let's see... Quicktime still works but the Sims 2 doesn't. Quicktime doesn't seem to break anything else, so logically, it MUST be Apple's fault. I think the rest of the Quicktime users who aren't playing the Sims 2 would disagree with your placement of blame. :)
Brainwashed much? You're basically implying that if I hit you in the head with a hammer and you're knocked out, but the hammer, nearby mailbox, and tree are unharmed, that proves that the hammer isn't to blame - your head is.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
In the flamebait but true category, this is further evidence why scripting languages are not suitable for most application development ... because they are much more brittle than a traditionally compiled application.
True you can site examples of traditionally compiled applications breaking due to missing dependencies, in which (like with this Perl example) the underlying deployment platform is a fault, but this type of problem is much more common with scripting languages (Perl, PHP, Python, etc), and vastly harder to debug and defend against.
As an XServe administrator, Apple's cryptic security updates are really starting to get on my nerves.
You would expect that, since it is based on multiple open-source projects that are freely available, Apple would push compiled updates through Software Update to its OS X Server users. Instead, they wait so long to patch things (like Amavis or the BIND patch for Dan Kaminsky's DNS bug) that I just get frustrated and apply the patch myself. Then, when a Apple Software Update does come down the pipe, I have to consider if installing it will break my configuration and land me in hot water with my boss when he can't get his e-mail anymore.
Apple needs to decide if they're going to regularly and consistently update the open-source software that their Server OS runs. If not, leave it alone and let the users apply and configure updates. This wishy-washy, middle-ground, Jobsy-come-lately approach is just an annoyance and an inconvenience.
Same here. I don't understand why I need the X11 sources compiled from fink just to get apache 2 and php.
Not sure about on Mac, but on FreeBSD I define WITHOUT_X11 so that it doesn't do that.
Not to pick nits too much here, but
1) Apple stopped using 5.25" FDDs well before the 1990s. Every Mac that came with a floppy drive from their inception in 1984 came with a 3.5" FDD.
2) You can always buy a third-party CRT if you want a CRT on your Mac, iMac excepted (obviously). Aside from that, having used expensive color-calibrated displays and printers and so forth with high-end color management, etc., I'll let you all in on a big secret: There's no such thing as true color matching. The laws of physics don't allow for it (light vs. pigment).
3) By the time most need to replace the battery in your notebook, it's usually time to get a new notebook. ;)
4) Another big secret: It's perfectly possible to write clear, self-documenting code in Perl. It's only the fact that Perl programmers seem to refuse to do this that allows Python to exist ;).
My blog
The update reverted Scalar::Util, which disabled the weak reference stuff needed by a lot of Catalyst libs. I just re-installed it and it worked again.
But on all my new machines, I just use a local lib instead of the system stuff. I don't need sudo access and then the whole lib gets backed up by Time Machine. If you just upgrade the system perl, you have to re-do it every time you restore from a Time Machine backup (it doesn't copy system stuff as near as I can tell).
Also, as some have observed, CPAN is a bad idea. I say this as someone who got screwed when Catalyst went to 5.7100 (I was at 5.7015). When I did a restore to a new machine, CPAN got all the new Catalyst libs and all my customizations blew up spectacularly.
If you are doing serious Perl development on your local Mac, use a local lib and do not rely on CPAN to automatically handle your dependencies. Install things by hand or create a (perl) script to handle the deps for you. That's what we had to do, as we needed to make sure the module version we used matched our production systems--where we do NOT use CPAN and where we upgrade manually and with careful thought.
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
With MacPorts you can provide a keyword before installing to see what options an install might have.
So for instance, for apache2 you might type:
port install apache2
to install. Before doing this, try:
port variants apache2
This should produce a list. Hopefully X11 is in there (I can't verify right now). Anyway, find any options you want to enable or disable, and reform your install to look like this:
port install apache2 +enable_option -disable_option
This will usually let you strip away a goofy dep like X11 from programs that don't really need it.
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
Quicktime is used on the Mac for much more than just showing a video - converting sound and image files from any format to any format (the reason my program can play AIFF, wav, MP3, AAC, etc is because Quicktime converts it to a stardard format for me). Therefore if the game is multiplatform like the Sims and all the sound effects are .wav files, Quicktime will probably be used as the standard API to convert them for playback.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Apple seems to have a separation between its left-brain UNIX underpinnings and its right-brain Quartz GUI.
For example, with the last several Security Updates, which contain very little information about what all's rolled in, Apple modifies /etc/postfix/main.cf
to
This effectively breaks all Internet-accessible postfix installs. Now, the question is why does Apple apply this to postfix installations explicitly enabled as Internet-accessible? I can't think of any good answer for this except as part of some other bass-ackwards security measures Apple applies in a schizophrenic attitude to the server functions of its UNIX-based client OS.
For another example, the Aiport Extreme Base Station prior to firmware 7.3.1 had a version of DMZ host (default host in Apple bizarro-world) that worked flawlessly. In April 2007 or thereabouts, Apple rolls out firmware 7.3.1, since which default host is broken for only for BIND (UDP port 53) and all mail ports (587, 110. 995, etc) but works for WoW, BitTorrent, and all other ports. WTF?! If I set my router to designate one computer as the default/universal host, why is it still blocking certain ports that have to be opened using port mapping?
This split-mind on UNIX vs. GUI seems to pervade Apple's mentality everywhere which is especially problematic to people like me that are not full-time developers but make extensive use of UNIX-layer services.
Really stupid stuff, Apple. I wish you'd cut it out.
blog
No, this is a compiled language problem. The module is an XS module, and it has components written in C. The Perl update causes a mismatch between the library referenced by the user's compile and the system supplied one.
Just another form of DLL hell.
If this was a Pure Perl module, this issue would never have mattered. Scripting languages have the same problems as any compiled language when you break libraries.
And if you are upgrading your base code in production without any form of testing, your code deserves to crash.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
this type of problem is much more common with scripting languages
I don't see how this follows in any way. Can you give some examples of why it would be more common for scripting languages? In this case, the compat problem is not with a Perl script, as I understand it - it's with a binary Perl extension that got linked against the wrong version of Perl library; so, really, it is rather an example of how brittle compiled stuff is...
This problem occurred only for people who updated their system's Perl distro via CPAN.
A vendor is free to do what it wants in the part of the system it supports. This isn't new, it's been done for decades on Unix with the distinction between the /usr/local hierarchy (a.k.a. "your crap, not ours") and the rest of /usr (i.e. "our crap, not yours").
People need to know that it's better to install customizations in /usr/local/lib/perl5, or even their home directory, than to fiddle with the vendor setup. This not only avoids vendor clobbering, but the separation is cleaner: mistakes are easier to contain and undo, you can easily test whether a problem is with your customizations or the vendor defaults, you don't necessarily need admin privileges, etc.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
That's funny... since 2000, MS has had two releases you'd have to pay to upgrade to... How many has Apple had? more than two... As for being constrained to the release cycle most new software runs in XP still... how much new Mac software runs in less than 10.3? not much.
I actually like OSX, it has a consistent UI on a Unix core. But your arguments only show your ignorance. For the record I like different aspects of a lot of OSes. There are even parts of Vista I like (mainly the restructuring of the user paths... though would rather have an "ALL" user back, opposed to the new location for global settings. I like that Linux has a FLOSS mindset, even if the zealots can't find a balance with commercial software.
I don' like a lot of the more politically minded decisions MS and others have taken. I find it ironic that Linux fanbois will use Samba, but ignore Mono because of patent concerns. Zealots from every corner are wrong, and spread FUD, it's what they do... the truth is generally somewhere in the middle.
-- happy Windows, Linux, BSD & Mac User
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info