[BlueOnyx:02037] Re: Perl conflicts in upgrade attempt

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Chuck,

> I've run into a problem updating one of our BX servers.  Perl and its
> dependancies won't upgrade.  

Quick question from my end: When you mean "Perl doesn't upgrade" ... do you 
mean you want to do a "yum update" against the BlueOnyx and CentOS 
repositories and Perl fails to update?

Or do you mean that you want to install a Perl from a third party, or one you 
build yourself?

In general I would advise against upgrading Perl on BlueOnyx with anything but 
a CentOS supplied Perl. It's fine to upgrade some Perl modules from CPAN (or 
through third party RPMs), but ripping out Perl itself and shoving in a Perl 
that wasn't specifically compiled for CentOS5 in "the RedHat way" may cause 
issues all over the place.

It starts with such small things as man pages which the third party perl may 
store in different places than the CentOS Perl. Or it could be that your third 
party Perl contains manpages which - on CentOS - are already aboard as they 
were supplied by another RPM.

Next there are the things that may appear to be less obvious. When you replace 
the onboard Perl with one that's radically newer, then future YUM updates of 
course still update the RPM supplied Perl modules. That may be fine, or it may 
not, as those are "expecting" to find the CentOS Perl and may not "play 
nicely" with your updated custom Perl. That is especially true for the 
BlueOnyx GUI interface, which also heavily relies on Perl based handlers and 
constructors and bring their own Perl module aboard which contains those 
aspects.

Personally and professionally I do a lot of things with Perl and in my 
opionion there are not enough things wrong with the CentOS5 Perl that would 
warrant an upgrade to the latest available Perl. Or any newer Perl than the 
one aboard on CentOS5. Most of the cripes I have with it can be settled by 
small work arounds or by upgrading some Perl modules to the latest versions.

At the worst and if you really need your custom Perl, you could leave the 
onboard Perl alone and compile a custom one with a modified prefix, so that it 
installs somewhere else. Like /usr/local instead of /usr. Then simply execute 
your Perl scripts which need the new Perl with the custom Perl and everything 
else that's fine with the onboard Perl can still use that one instead.

> Most of it appears to be conflict with the package 
> perl-ExtUtils-MakeMaker-6.30-1.noarch. Does anyone recognize that package
> name, or know what its used for? 

http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/3628185/com/perl-ExtUtils-
MakeMaker-6.30-1.noarch.rpm.html

That RPM is not present on a stock BlueOnyx and it's not available in the 
CentOS Yum repository either. But I seem to remember that MailScanner installs 
usually forced it aboard with a brutal --force --nodeps. Both let my hairs 
stand on end (MailScanner and what it does to my beloved Perl. :o).

Are you by chance trying to install MailScanner?

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber