If I was that concerned, I could just build Perl 5.8.5 from source. But that would also mean building my own mod_perl. And that's a can of worms that I'd like to keep firmly closed.
Actually, it's not that tough to build your own mod_perl. The documentation is very good. It's even gotten a little easier with mod_perl2/Apache2. In fact, from what I've read on the mod_perl mailing list, the rpms for mod_perl from Red Hat have always been so buggy that the greater headache would be using those! :-)
The main pain, though, is that you do have to read the documentation to make it easy. I find this helpful, though, since mod_perl is so critical to my business that I want to understand what's going on. Also, the documentation is really excellent and the mailing list truly top rate.
To tell you the truth, the main reason I decided against Red Hat path and am going with Fedora is the poor quality of the versions of mod_perl and apache rpms that were shipped with RH. I always ended up removing them and building my own. So, why pay for their "stable" system which was unstable for me?
I decided a year or so ago that wherever possible I'd stick with rpms supplied by my distribution. Generally that makes life much simpler.
A good rule of thumb. However, wrt mod_perl, this is one place where it is not possible. :-)
YMMV
Take care,
Kurt Hansen
