Huh? /usr/bin/perl is an installed application like any other and is not the OS. So, what you are telling me is that it is better to leave a broken Perl in place than replace it with one that works?

Let me give a really good example of why I'll put my own copy of /usr/bin/perl in place of one that is there already. Solaris 10 comes with a version of Perl. Unfortunately it is compiled with Sun's own liscenced compiler. If I just want to accept the list of CPAN modules that Sun has so graciously supplied then that's ok.

However, in this case our environment, which stores all user account information in LDAP needs to have Net::LDAP and friends installed on all the servers for some of our user administration tools to work. Since our LDAP servers are connected to via LDAPS and not clear text LDAP we need the whole family of SSL related modules compiled in as well.

None of those will work correctly if you try and compile them with a compiler other than Sun's compiler assuming we leave Sun's version of Perl in place.

Contractual and financial realities being what they are on that account we are not going to be having access to a Sun compiler anytime soon, so we use GCC.

That's where proper engineering practices come into play. Anything we do in our production environment has already been done on test boxes. While we don't have the luxury of an official Sun compiler, we do have test boxes we can do things to before impacting production.

So, your argument of "don't mess with it" in this case doesn't hold much water. I would agree with your assesment if proper engineering wasn't done ahead of time and without a good understanding of the systems and applications involved.

Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional
Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg

In reply to Re^3: Secure deployment of binary perl modules by blue_cowdawg
in thread Secure deployment of binary perl modules by KillerDll

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