My machines really have four different roles: production, testing, build, and development. I think your first paragraph is arguing for the same version on testing and production, which I certainly agree with -- I also am very familiar with memory corruption bugs in various version of Perl. (Including some that haven't been fixed as of 5.8.5...) And my original question is irrelevant if I run the same version on my build box as on the production boxes.

I certainly don't want to always run the same version on my development box as on the production box; I'd never be able to upgrade that way. But I don't think that's really what you're saying.

So I think you're right, in that it shouldn't really be an issue. I ought to build the RPMs on both the build and development boxes, and install the build box's version on testing and production, and the development box's version on development. The problem is, I'm lazy and don't really have a distinction between development and build boxes most of the time. Not only that, but I can't tell from just the RPM filename what version of Perl it was built for. So I keep running into problems where I keep trying to install the wrong RPM on the wrong box. (Dependencies catch the problem, assuming I'm not being stupid and using --nodeps. Which I often am. But I still end up copying the wrong RPM to the "install all these on this box" directories.)

Considering that most of these are pure-perl, noarch RPMs, it's annoying -- the bits are identical, but they go into different directories according to what are supposed to be versions of Perl with identical public APIs.

In reply to Re^2: Version-independent installation directories by sfink
in thread Version-independent installation directories by sfink

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.