in reply to default perl on linux

To give you a word of advice by somebody who severely damaged his Debian distribution by installing a different perl executable - don't. The system Perl executable should never be changed other than through the vendor's own upgrade mechanism. Yes, this means you should install your own Perl separately if the system Perl is not enough for you.

For example, Debians (and by inheritance, Ubuntus) apt-get was at some time (and I presume it still is) written in Perl - if you install another Perl, all the modules needed by apt-get will become unavailable to your new Perl unless you manually hunt them down and copy them over. The Debian folks didn't put these modules onto CPAN so you can't conveniently install them into other Perls, either.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: default perl on linux
by grep (Monsignor) on Sep 02, 2006 at 18:30 UTC
    I have maintained 2 versions of perl on a box for several years. Interchange required a non-threaded perl and Fedora/RH (in thier wisdom) only distributes threaded perl. Thier threaded perl also has a load of dependancies to system tools. Though none of the tools relied on threads (which makes the least sense of all). My situation has since changed, due to some package finagling, I now only run non-threaded perl, but my distro thinks it's the regular version (advice on the Interchange Mailing List)

    It's a pain - I had one in /usr/bin/ and the other /usr/local/bin/. The biggest and most frequent pain (but not the only) was I had to match modules to both verions - which means double installs (which is quite easy to forget). You also have to exclude perl updates in yum.

    My advice - ditch one version or if you need to stay really current find a way to compile.



    grep
    Mynd you, mønk bites Kan be pretti nasti...
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom