It's not clear to me what your boss meant by "replicate". Are you supposed to install a current stable perl and current versions of all the modules you had? That's fairly easy (see the autobundle suggestion), but presumes that there will be a thorough testing cycle before putting the new servers into production.

A somewhat safer alternative (but perhaps not the best thing in the long run) is to keep the same version of perl and the same module versions. But that can get complicated.

If you had been on 5.005_03, you may need to upgrade to 5.005_04 (which had really a bare minimum of patches necessary to make it compile on newer operating systems and newer gcc.) If you were using any other version, you need to chose between upgrading or possibly needing to patch perl to even get it to compile.

If the original build of perl was done sensibly, you should be able to say perl -V:config_args to see what options were used to build perl; this won't work if the -d flag wasn't used or options were provided in the Policy.sh file instead of the command line.

I would hope that modules that were installed on the old servers were done with some process that involved keeping the tarballs somewhere; if not, you've got some hunting to do. If the older versions are gone from CPAN, you may still find them at http://backpan.cpan.org.

Even with preserving old versions of everything, you've still got interactions with the operating system or any other software to worry about; don't assume you can just plop the new servers into production and have everything just work.

In reply to Re: Installing modules, trial by fire by ysth
in thread Installing modules, trial by fire by anonamonk

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