On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 07:18:03AM -0500, David Fleck wrote:
> On Thu, 9 Apr 2009, Eric Wilhelm wrote:
> >If you're installing today's code from the CPAN directly on outdated
> >production machines, you're doing it wrong. That's not a problem with
> >M::B, and it is not a new user's immediate concern.
> So, what *should* you install on outdated production machines? Because
> where I work, we've got a lot of them. In fact, 'outdated' and
> 'production' are practically synonyms. And that's not going to change
> anytime soon.
Ideally, you'll be installing packages either from the vendor's package
repository or rolling your own. Whether they be debs, rpms or plain old
tarballs isn't particularly important. That way, you get known versions
of modules, instead of whatever the most recent version is on the CPAN
at the time you install on that particular machine, and so it's easy to
keep all your machines in sync - you don't have the problem of
installing Foo::Bar on one machine on Monday (and getting version 1.4)
and installing another machine with Foo::Bar 2.0 on Friday (which has
exciting API changes which your real-world (and therefore incomplete)
test suite doesn't catch).
But that's the ideal, and so all too often doesn't happen.
--
David Cantrell | Hero of the Information Age
fdisk format reinstall, doo-dah, doo-dah;
fdisk format reinstall, it's the Windows way
