Just because it does not meet your needs does not mean it is broken.

I'm sorry... but that smacks of "we know what's best for you." I beg to differ. If sometihng that is shipped with an OS doesn't meet my needs it is IMHO by definition broken.

I have a table saw in my workshop. Its table is only two feet wide. I regularly cut four foot by eight foot sheets of plywood on it. So I have feed extensions that I've added to the mix to help with that.

Further, that table saw came with a rip blade that is not suited to cutting plywood. Do I leave the rip blade in there assuming the saw manufacturer knows what's best for me and deal with the mess or do I buy a blade more suited to cutting plywood and install it? Geez.. by your definition I'm messing with the design of the table saw. I won't even get into the modifications I've made to the saw itself including the much improved blade guide I added. (Thank you Workbench magazine!)

Do you make sure that SUNWpl5u (and the supporting packages) are uninstalled (or never installed)?

As a matter of fact the latter. SUNWpl5u is specifically left out of our builds because of the issues I've already outlined.

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?

What part of my comments made you think that things aren't tracked?

You mention Sun's JES Directory server. Not used in my shop since we used OpenLDAP for the same thing. One of the reasons I've already mentioned for doing what I do.

Fiber monitoring tools? Again. Not an issue in our shop. However it was in a previous shop that I worked for and our version of Perl that we packaged worked fine.

Do you have a list of every script on your system that uses /usr/bin/perl?

Considering that my shop is the only one doing scripting in Perl? That's a safe assumption. Since 2001 when I joined this shop we have yet to run into an issue like you are describing. Our testing is rather thorough so we must be doing something right.

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

Which is why we test. And test again. In fact we have one system in particular dedicated to that end. It is rebuilt every week automatically and the latest patches (along with the latest versions of our internal packages) applied to it. This is how we detect bad patches (something Sun has excelled at producing lately for Solaris 10) before they are applied to our production environment.

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