It all comes down to why we've ended up with this version of Perl being distributed by RH. If they had legitmate reasons for compiling it in that way, then I guess it's fair enough. If it's an error on their part, then it's something they should fix immediately.

That said, even if they did have specific reasons for breaking Perl for everyone else, then maybe they should've shipped with 2 versions of Perl, one used by their code, and one for general use.

I can't really accept that a barrier to using Perl should be that you have to compile it yourself. Are we trying to drive people away deliberately? How successful would Linux be if everyone had to compile their own kernel (even for commercial use)?