On Tue, 26 Aug 2008, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
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.
There is merit in having your own "application" perl vs using the "system"
perl for everything. That way you can "decide" .
It is NOT a good idea to replace the "system" perl.
-Connie Sieh
Keith
