64/32 bit perl

former33t has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

This may be out of scope, but if anyone has the answer, please enlighten me.

I am in a bit of a conundrum. Most of my client machines I am developing for are 32 bit machines running RHEL3. For some other software I have to develop against, I had to install RHEL4 on my machine in 64 bit. This installed the 64 bit perl via the rpm and of course now numerous other packages installed are dependent on it.

I still need to do development and testing of perl apps for the 32 bit machines untill the roll forward to 64 bit a year or so from now. I tried installing the perl i386 rpm, and although that 'worked' (as in didn't fail), it didn't install the 32 bit perl binary (did create directories for the default perl packages, etc.). I know I can roll my own 32 bit perl package in /opt or something, but I'm leaning against that since the company generally wants everything installed by rpm that can be (who can blame them). The RHEL4 i386 perl package is not relocatable, so that didn't work either.

Any ideas?

Comment on 64/32 bit perl

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Re: 64/32 bit perl by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Dec 10, 2007 at 14:48 UTC
Sounds like you need some virtual machines. Xen, Qemu ... all good solutions. I do this on my Mac for testing IE6 and IE7 (have two WinXP VMs). My criteria for good software: Does it work? Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?	[reply]
Re: 64/32 bit perl by hsinclai (Deacon) on Dec 10, 2007 at 14:52 UTC
I've faced that same challange and concur with dragonchild that VMs are the way to go - I use VMware Server on Linux and Fusion or Parallels on OSX. -Harold	[reply] [d/l]
Re: 64/32 bit perl by ides (Deacon) on Dec 10, 2007 at 17:23 UTC
The i386 RPM should have installed the 32-bit binary. When faced with situations like this I usually just remove it entirely and then re-install the i386 RPM. This really shouldn't be that big of a deal. Just remove Perl ( ignoring the dependencies ) entirely and then reinstall it. You might have to do some dependency clean up of certain CPAN modules that other RHEL packages need, but it should be minor. Frank Wiles <frank@revsys.com> www.revsys.com	[reply]