[suggest] Re: suggest Digest, Vol 37, Issue 1

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

Dag wrote:

	Correct. The message to anyone using perl modules is:

    	 If you want your product to work on RHEL4, or RHEL5, then do not
    	 require any newer versions of those perl modules.


It's awkward. There is a serious dependency hell when backporting 
packages from Fedora, or cross-porting them from Debian or from CPAN 
modules. It's not that redHat was unreasonable about what they include 
in the base Perl package, but they include quite a few components that 
needn't be quite so integral. And the CPAN module management assumes 
that it can, gracefully, replace components that are part of the central 
package itself. This is aggravated by modules that have been migrated 
into the current version of Perl, where attempts to build them 
discreetly from CPAN simply grabs the complete latest Perl package, and 
that is a maintenance nightmare to replace.

One alternative is to maiintain your own local Perl distribution, call 
it 'perl-local', leave out the particular modules that conflict, and set 
'Provides: perl'-%{version}' in the .spec file for perl-local. I've done 
that trick at need. I don't recommend it for Dag's wonderful repository, 
because replacing such a central system component is begging for pain.  
But I went through this a lot last year, when working with Musicbrainz, 
and I'm going through it right now with Lilac and its necessary PHP 
dependency tree.

                   Nico Kadel-Garcia