in reply to Is there a term for this?

You have my sympathy. When I have encountered such environments/situations in the past I have referred to them as adminstrative fascism as a nod to the venerable Know your System Administrator by Stephan Zielinski.

If your target box has no compiler and you have no suitable cross-compilation available elsewhere then any non-PP module such as XML::LibXML is going to prove tricky at the very least. PP modules should still be feasible even if it is a bind installing and deleting them over and over, not that I am a user of such a PP XML module. Hopefully the reward of your work is worth the drudgery.

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Re^2: Is there a term for this?
by mw (Sexton) on Oct 16, 2019 at 15:44 UTC

    Financial institutions. Interesting environment. They say they are risk-averse, but what they really are is blame-averse. They want everything change-managed, version controlled, box-ticked, signed off, audited, and what have you. I am the drokking sysadmin on these boxes, and I have to ask for root. It's not that you couldn't work around it. I have on occasion added to my projects the .pms of CPAN modules I really could not be bothered to rewrite, skirting the definition of "installed".

    Administrative fascist is a little too aggressive for my taste. But thank you for that link, I could use the giggles. LibXML is just an example. Obstacle course maybe?

    Oh well... let's see if there is something fun in the ticket queue.

[reply]
      They say they are risk-averse, but what they really are is blame-averse.

      Truer words have rarely been uttered.

[reply]
Re^2: Is there a term for this?
by trippledubs (Deacon) on Oct 17, 2019 at 02:25 UTC

    Know your system administrator

    Nice link. What are all these references to xtrek? Google it and of course instantly pops up and so now 7 minutes of my life subtracted to explore the text based x rated Star Trek Enterprise of 1995. Who makes a game from next generation.. lame :)

[reply]

      This is a bit of history for me; perhaps someone who has actually seen it can chime in.

      There were a number of Star Trek themed computer war games with basically the same concept: fly the Enterprise around blowing up Klingons and other enemies of the Federation. If I understand correctly, xtrek was somewhat different — a multiplayer space combat game set in Star Trek with factions from that setting and using X11 for display, thus the "x" in the name. I believe that Xpilot is a similar game that should be less obscure.

      Administrators, of course, sometimes considered such things wastes of "valuable computing resources" and did what would be expected, leading to a cat-and-mouse metagame of playing the game without getting caught by the system operators. :-)

[reply]
        You understand correctly. I played xtrek a few times in the early 90s, but never really got into it. (I was much more enthralled with the even more obscure Galactic Bloodshed - in modern terms, a multiplayer 4X space game with simultaneous turns passing in real time. (e.g., every six hours, the previous turn is processed and a new turn starts))

        In my case, both the xtrek and gb servers were being run by sysadmin friends at the local university, so at least we didn't have to deal with the metagame you mentioned.

[reply]

        in my quest for historical xtrek knowledge, I must have played the wrong one cause the x definitely did not stand for X11. I can never look at sweet mind reading matriarchal Counselor Troi the same way again.

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Re^2: Is there a term for this?
by FreeBeerReekingMonk (Deacon) on Oct 16, 2019 at 21:33 UTC
    alias PP='Pure Perl'

    f4uIoX9fKg4

[reply]

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