i seem to have worked myself into an interesting corner, and wearing an expression of appropriate humility i shuffle forth to seek the counsel of the illustrious denizens of this most hallowed virtual space.

the platform in question at this point runs the debian unstable distribution, which i upgraded to the most current packages earlier this week. (what can i say, i'm a risk-taker (grin)). yesterday i began working to install mod_perl, and ran into difficulty building the mod_perl enabled httpd. after doing some searches here and elsewhere i surmised that the problem was attributable to a perl interpreter compiled with an earlier version of gcc, so i downloaded the 5.6.1 source and recompiled. configuration and compilation of mod_perl and apache went smoothly as a result.

as you might suspect, given that i'm posting this, there's a fly in the ointment. the debian configuration tool debconf is itself perl-based, and now i seem to have the same problem in reverse ... i get version error messages when i try to configure any debian packages. this currently includes the postgresql and mysql dbd drivers, as i've always found it much smoother to configure those from debian. while i might be able to get around that problem by messing around with the make process (their installation bombs out when trying from the MCPAN -e shell interactive tool) i have more concern about the state of the debian configuration. i've searched at the debian site and have been unable to find the source modules debian.pm and debconf.pm to try re-installing with the newer compiler, which by the way is gcc v.2.95.4.

so at this point my inclination is to uninstall the later perl interpreter, given that i have a working httpd that includes mod_perl, and revert to the earlier 5.6 installed by debian, if i can get that done in a way that doesn't involve debconf. (right off the top of my head i can't remember if dpkg uses debconf).

in the spirit of "look before you leap" i thought i should seek the wisdom of those whose awareness extends to the very harmony of the modules. getting pretty deep, ain't it? i should just stop.

any ideas?

In reply to perl, compilers, and debian configuration by ralphie

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