Hi,

I need to install and manage a single fairly modern version of Perl across roughly 10 servers plus a cluster, which run different version of Redhat and its kin.

I'm not root on these systems, but the sysadmins will do a few things for me upon request. However they won't let me overwrite the default Perl's on these systems, since they don't want to destabilize other aspects of the systems.

The default Perl on seven systems running "Scientific Linux SL release 5.3 (Boron)" is 5.8.8. There's also a system running "Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.3 (Tikanga)" which runs 5.8.8. There are two other servers plus hundreds of cluster nodes which run "Scientific Linux release 6.3 (Carbon)" and Perl 5.10.1.

I am open to standardizing upon any reasonably recent Perl version, such as 5.10.1 or 5.16.3.

I would like to install a parallel (non-default) single version of Perl to work on all of these systems. I have considered perlbrew and local::lib, but for now am instead following the advice of Brian D. Foy who suggests careful construction of Perl from source using the "Configure" script, e.g.: ./Configure -des -Dprefix=/usr/local/perls/perl-5.16.3 Stackoverflow link while avoiding the use of the PERL5LIB environment variable.

Building Perl doesn't take that long, but fighting through the installation of all the CPAN modules which are prerequisites for our in-house modules takes several hours. So when you try different variations of this over-and-over-again, it seems like a never-ending battle.

------------------------------

Based upon the advice of a local sysadmin, I decided to build my Perl on the oldest relevant O.S., and hope that backwards-compatability will permit everything to run on newer systems. Similarly I'm not attempting any static linking of libraries. In this example, I built Perl 5.16.3 on SL 5.3.

In addition to some challenges involving AUTOLOAD, the other major barrier are dynamic libraries from XS code, such as the following in /usr/local/perl5/perls/perl-5.16.3/lib/site_perl/5.16.3:

./x86_64-linux/auto/DBD/Pg/Pg.so ./x86_64-linux/auto/DBD/mysql/mysql.so ./x86_64-linux/auto/List/MoreUtils/MoreUtils.so ./x86_64-linux/auto/Params/Util/Util.so ./x86_64-linux/auto/Params/Validate/XS/XS.so ./x86_64-linux/auto/Term/ReadKey/ReadKey.so ./x86_64-linux/auto/DateTime/DateTime.so ./x86_64-linux/auto/GD/GD.so ./x86_64-linux/auto/Clone/Clone.so

For example, one (critical) local Perl script runs OK on the older SL 5.3 systems. But on an SL 6.3 system it yields the following error:

install_driver(Pg) failed: Can't load '/usr/local/perl5/perls/perl-5.16.3/lib/site_perl/5.16.3/x86_64-linux/auto/DBD/Pg/Pg.so' for module DBD::Pg: libpq.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory at /usr/local/perl5/perls/perl-5.16.3/lib/5.16.3/x86_64-linux/DynaLoader.pm line 190, <DATA> line 751. at (eval 390) line 3. Compilation failed in require at (eval 390) line 3, <DATA> line 751. Perhaps a required shared library or dll isn't installed where expected at /usr/local/perl5/perls/perl-5.16.3/lib/site_perl/5.16.3/Rose/DB.pm line 965.

There's no libpq.so.4 on the newer system, only /usr/lib64/libpq.so.5.

I'd love to know how to address this libpq problem in particular, but it seems like just the tip of the iceberg, and that I need to modify my approach in some fashion. I did spend some time with perlbrew, but run into similar problems there.

Thanks in advance for your advice …

In reply to managing a single Perl installation across slightly different Linux OSs by jae_63

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