Helping Perl Packagers Package Perl

jamie writes "chromatic has a great post today on the conflict between OS distributions and CPAN's installations of perl modules, along with some suggestions for how to start resolving this maddening problem: '[Though Debian has] made plenty of CPAN distributions available as .debs, I have to configure my CPAN client myself, and it does not work with the system package manager. There's no reason it couldn't. Imagine that the system Perl 5 included in the default package... had a CPAN client configured appropriately. It has selected an appropriate mirror (or uses the redirector). It knows about installation paths. It understands how to use LWP...' The idea of providing guidelines to distros for how to safely package modules is a great one. Could modules request (a modified?) test suite be run after distro-installation? Could Module::Build help module authors and distro maintainers establish the rules somehow?"

Comments

Re:At least the Perl crowd is trying,

[mcrbids]

RedHat is somewhere between 1 and 2 years late releasing RHEL 6. The split of Red Hat Linux into Fedora and RHEL came back to bite RHEL 6, because when RedHat tried to release the responsibility of developing Fedora to the community, what they got in return was an overemphasis on nifty cool stuff while long-standing bugs, some very severe, went disregarded.

Turns out, people who aren't getting paid to do it only want to do it if it's fun! And so the quality of Fedora, which is what RHEL is ultimately based on, dropped, increasingly sharply, until Fedora Core 9 was so bad it was actually unusable! You couldn't even so much as change the font size in X before it would crash!

I wish I was kidding. It was horrible.

So RedHat got the hint, and for the last year has hired a legion of programmers to do little more than fix every bug they can find. There are reams and reams. Rumor is that Fedora Core 12 is ultimately in line to be RHEL 6. I'm using Fedora 10, and it's finally about as stable as Fedora 8.

We can only hope! RHEL 5 is really starting to show its age, and I have a suite of RHEL 4 servers that I want to switch over to something newer, but as old as 5 is, I'd rather make the jump to 6 as soon as it comes out than do another switchover in a year or two.