This just in: http://blog.vipul.net/2008/08/24/redhat-perl-what-a-tragedy/
Summary: The Upstream Vendor version of Perl has a patch to the "bless[]" function that makes it /extremely/ slow. Most of us do not write that kind of of fancy Perl, but a lot of us use one of the 1500+ CPAN modules that do. The slowdown can be over 100x with some programs. This affects Fedora 9 as well as the various version 5 distros. TUV-patched Perl version 5.8.8 also breaks the Math::GSL package that I wrote about a few days ago. It runs fine with 5.10 . What to do? Some people are downloading and recompiling Perl; we have version 5.8.8, while version 5.10 is available . A few are abandoning Perl. A few are abandoning TUV-inspired distros. A few are buying way more hardware than they would otherwise need. Since some of the scientific community (especially the life sciences) are running huge amounts of Perl, this is probably a Big Deal. We should explore the problem further with TUV and the CentOS community. If a fix is not forthcoming from TUV, I reluctantly suggest that we get together with the CentOS people and fork this portion of the distro, perhaps standardizing on Perl 5.10 . There are people in the Perl community ready to assist us. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [EMAIL PROTECTED] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs
