I thought I was being pretty clever earlier this week. Turns out I wasn't and this might serve as a cautionary tale for anyone else considering such cleverness.
Most of the work I do is Perl development and it bothered me slightly that the version of Perl available for FC2 is two minor versions behind the current release (5.8.3 vs 5.8.5). Poking around on the Fedora download server over the weekend I found a 5.8.5 rpm in
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development/i386/Fedora/RPMS/
So I downloaded it and installed it. Everything seemed to work fine for a couple of days.
Then, earlier today, I needed to restart Apache because I'd changed some configuration stuff. But it wouldn't restart. There was some binary version incompatibility in DynaLoader.pm. "Aha!", I thought, "I just need to update mod_perl as well". I did this, and mod_perl-devel as well for good measure. That didn't solve the problem. So I looked at upgrading the various apr-* rpms as well. At that point I got into dependency hell as one of these rpms needed a new version of openldap and that was going to affect a large number of other rpms on the system.
So I backed everything out and went back to the original versions of everything. It all works again now.
But it raises a couple of questions in my mind.
1/ The perl-5.8.5 rpm should probably have complained that it wouldn't work with my existing mod_perl rpm. Is there a dependency missing there.
2/ Why isn't there a Perl 5.8.5 rpm that works with the FC2 release?
Don't have much of an answer for you, but is there a reason not using ActiveState's ActivePerl?
http://downloads.activestate.com/ActivePerl/Linux/5.8/ActivePerl-5.8.4.810-i686-linux.tar.gz
Havn't tried it myself on Linux (I develop with Perl on Windows), but maybe it's worth a try...
Cheers,
Dave...
Alex
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