I’ll throw my $.02 into the ring….

Solaris 8 on up ship with a /usr/bin/perl. Therefore by definition if you replace it you are “messing with the OS”.

Just because it does not meet your needs does not mean it is broken. It is the Perl that the OS vendor and those who develop for that platform expect to be there and that is what is important to keep in mind and that is why it should not be replaced.

Do you know what parts of the OS use the vendor supplied Perl? Do you know what additional applications use it? Do you know what will use it in the future? Catching one of these problems in test is good but it doesn’t change that you would have to do some re-engineering.

Do you make sure that SUNWpl5u (and the supporting packages) are uninstalled (or never installed)? Or do you leave the packages out there and just overwrite the files? If you leave the packages there then what do you do regarding patches? What do you do when upgrading the OS? What if the new OS has dependencies on /usr/bin/perl that the previous version did not?

Let’s talk about your test environment. Do you have a list of every script on your system that uses /usr/bin/perl? Do you specifically test these for compatibility as part of your testing process? Do you update your list? From your post it sounds like the answer to all of these is a negative. Wouldn’t proper engineering be to document everything that relies on /usr/bin/perl, keep that list up to date, and test everything that actively uses it?

Looking at a couple systems here it looks like /usr/bin/perl is used by Gnome, fibre monitoring tools such as SUNWstade, and some Internationalization tools. And here’s a big one -- SUN’s JES Directory Server, which is now included with Solaris (starting with one of the later Hardware Releases for Solaris 9 I believe). And that’s just from a quick look.

Anyway, I hope you get the idea (if nothing else that your decision can have unforeseen future ramifications).

In reply to (OT) Re^4: Secure deployment of binary perl modules by Argel
in thread Secure deployment of binary perl modules by KillerDll

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