Jonathan Rockway <j...@jrock.us> writes: > * On Thu, Apr 09 2009, Arthur Corliss wrote:
[...] >> Even more so when you have people installing modules via CPAN and >> outside of package management. They always run the risk of updating perl >> and forgetting a litany of other modules that were installed for various >> scripts, etc., which use XS modules, etc. The anticipation of that kind of >> triage is more than enough reason for a lot of people to avoid updating >> perl. How many sys-admins and non-developers are aware of perlocal.pod? > > Most people I know compile one perl for each of their applications. The > OS perl is for the OS, not for you. (OK, and packages the OS installs. > Basically, if you plan on modifying anything perl touches in any way, > you want your own perl install for that. Otherwise, yeah, you will > break your OS. Why would this surprise anyone?) I have to say, I have used the OS-provided Perl for everything since Perl 5 started coming with the OS. Anything else would be a support nightmare for small projects. I would find it very hard to convince consulting clients to take on the support costs of maintaining a separate version of Perl, with a separate process for security updates, etc. I do install modules someplace like '/usr/local/perl' so the OS Perl doesn't generally see them, and I don't go around making random changes, but the OS Perl has always worked fine for me, even for fairly complicated projects. ----Scott.
