Hi Chuck, > I've run into a problem updating one of our BX servers. Perl and its > dependancies won't upgrade.
Quick question from my end: When you mean "Perl doesn't upgrade" ... do you mean you want to do a "yum update" against the BlueOnyx and CentOS repositories and Perl fails to update? Or do you mean that you want to install a Perl from a third party, or one you build yourself? In general I would advise against upgrading Perl on BlueOnyx with anything but a CentOS supplied Perl. It's fine to upgrade some Perl modules from CPAN (or through third party RPMs), but ripping out Perl itself and shoving in a Perl that wasn't specifically compiled for CentOS5 in "the RedHat way" may cause issues all over the place. It starts with such small things as man pages which the third party perl may store in different places than the CentOS Perl. Or it could be that your third party Perl contains manpages which - on CentOS - are already aboard as they were supplied by another RPM. Next there are the things that may appear to be less obvious. When you replace the onboard Perl with one that's radically newer, then future YUM updates of course still update the RPM supplied Perl modules. That may be fine, or it may not, as those are "expecting" to find the CentOS Perl and may not "play nicely" with your updated custom Perl. That is especially true for the BlueOnyx GUI interface, which also heavily relies on Perl based handlers and constructors and bring their own Perl module aboard which contains those aspects. Personally and professionally I do a lot of things with Perl and in my opionion there are not enough things wrong with the CentOS5 Perl that would warrant an upgrade to the latest available Perl. Or any newer Perl than the one aboard on CentOS5. Most of the cripes I have with it can be settled by small work arounds or by upgrading some Perl modules to the latest versions. At the worst and if you really need your custom Perl, you could leave the onboard Perl alone and compile a custom one with a modified prefix, so that it installs somewhere else. Like /usr/local instead of /usr. Then simply execute your Perl scripts which need the new Perl with the custom Perl and everything else that's fine with the onboard Perl can still use that one instead. > Most of it appears to be conflict with the package > perl-ExtUtils-MakeMaker-6.30-1.noarch. Does anyone recognize that package > name, or know what its used for? http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/3628185/com/perl-ExtUtils- MakeMaker-6.30-1.noarch.rpm.html That RPM is not present on a stock BlueOnyx and it's not available in the CentOS Yum repository either. But I seem to remember that MailScanner installs usually forced it aboard with a brutal --force --nodeps. Both let my hairs stand on end (MailScanner and what it does to my beloved Perl. :o). Are you by chance trying to install MailScanner? -- With best regards Michael Stauber _______________________________________________ Blueonyx mailing list [email protected] http://www.blueonyx.it/mailman/listinfo/blueonyx
