Tad said:
Thankyou. I stopped listening two weeks ago for reasons I have mentioned
before.
Back to the original subject, I still think there is a problem with O/S's
mandating the version of Perl. Now in Solaris' case* there is a clean
solution since Sun have only made a link to their install from
/usr/bin/perl, but wouldn't you know it, a similar problem has hit me from
a customer with RH enterprise - some sort of print service is demanding
access to a Foomatic module. I haven't investigated yet but my immediate
thought was back to the same subject on Solaris, and also to muse that
maybe the author of the printer script didn't know enough to responsibly
write
use FindBin;
use lib "$FindBin::Bin/lib"; # or similar
Honestly, I'm not against O/S supplying a copy of all the Perl stuff if
they want to supply O/S scripts calling on perl, but of all the components
that should be stuffed into a "special place" surely it's the O/S that
should be using a special place. Many users of Linux, Solaris or any other
UNIX** will want to upgrade Perl at their own schedule. It's a big
responsibility for the O/S to start owning the installed versions and
getting in the way of customer software.
I hope the RH install also uses a similar arrangement as Solaris, and
maybe that $PERL5LIB (sp?) will solve the Foomatic problem. I can't build
my binaries to predict all the possible install locations for Perl from
O/Ss. I fit and supply dedicated systems for typically single-minded
purposes. We put database engines, large application suites, and
ancilliary tools at specific build levels, and it's not acceptable for O/S
to make that difficult when a bit more care could have been applied to
protect the steadily increasing number of scripts within the O/S.
The alternative is that every bloody machine has 15 copies of Perl all
loading into "special places". Perhaps the steady stream of Perl versions
is partially responsible for this unfortunate experience. Over a similar
timeframe, Java has barely reached - what, 1.4 is it now?
* come on krakle, correct my use of apostrophe if you like, and if you
think I care
** who cares to re-educate me that "Linux is not UNIX"? krakle? Teach me
all about it please.