Gorby has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello Wise Monks.

I recently acquired a new server and the OS that my data center installed was red hat 9 that came with Perl 5.8. When I tried to run my Perl programs there, I got the error that said CGI.pm can't be found. True enough, it was really missing. There was a file called CGI.pm.newcgi or something like that instead.

What's up with that? Should I be scared that there are other modules that Perl 5.8 truncated without warning?

Would appreciate some light on this subject.

Thanks in advance.

Gorby

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: No CGI.pm in Perl 5.8?
by iburrell (Chaplain) on May 13, 2004 at 22:27 UTC
    The problem isn't Perl 5.8, it is Red Hat 9. CGI.pm was packaged separately by Redhat. I think this is done because it wasn't core in old versions of Perl, to allow the module to be upgraded separately.

    The solution is to install the perl-CGI package. There are other core modules that are in separate packages. I forget what they are right now, but I had an earlier comment about them on perlmonks.

    The problem is that it doesn't get installed by default and confuses lots of people that expect perl package to include all the core modules. This was changed in Fedora Core 1; CGI.pm is in perl package.

      There are other core modules that are in separate packages. I forget what they are right now, but I had an earlier comment about them on perlmonks.
      here: 343762 =)
Re: No CGI.pm in Perl 5.8?
by tinita (Parson) on May 13, 2004 at 22:24 UTC
    i think that is redhat specific; they sorted out some packages. you should be able to install them seperately, but i can't say for sure, don't have a redhat here.
Re: No CGI.pm in Perl 5.8?
by perrin (Chancellor) on May 14, 2004 at 03:49 UTC
    In addition to what the others said about Red Hat 9, I would point out that it has big locale problems which will keep you from compiling many CPAN modules unless you fix it. It also has performance problems: just doing a default compile of perl from source on the same box will give you a perl that is about 15% faster than Red Hat's. That's because they compile with threading and debugging turned on.