Perl and catalyst broken on Centos 5

14 01 2009

I’ve spent alot of time pulling out my hair trying to get catalyst (among other things) installed properly.

It looks like perl is hopelessly broken on CentOS 5 (and Redhat/RHEL/Fedora.) I’d reached that conclusion a couple days ago when it couldn’t install Catalyst or CGI::Application.

I’d been down the road to CPAN hell over and over again, but finally gave up (just when I miraculously got Apache::Request::Dispatcher installed, which actually looks closer to what I want.

Internet searches confirm my suspicions:

http://dailyvim.blogspot.com/2008/08/perl-broken-on-centos-52-and-fedora-9.html

http://www.linux-archive.org/centos/148702-slow-perl-centos-5-a.html

I don’t know if the performance issue is related
to the other problems, but there was supposedly a patch on someone’s personal repository for CentOS 4, so I’d hoped that by upgrading from 5.0 to 5.2 (at least a couple years) it would be fixed, but it looks like not.

I might as well wipe out my CentOS partition on the new One Shore linode, since it looks like Red Hat is for all intents and purposes out of business.  Their stupid business model caused companies like CentOS to fill a niche, but it looks like the CentOS community can’t keep up (or isn’t interested in perl — or even Apache.)

Does this mean the death of Linux as a commercially supported operating system?  Is the Debian/Ubuntu community strong enough to survive?  Can they provide enterprise features now that SuSE and Redhat no longer can (or will)?  Maybe there just isn’t a need for the legacy LAMP platform?  Is it RoR going forward?  Or (tin foil hats on) are kickbacks from Microsoft to quietly fail more profitable than supporting the web development community?


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9 responses

14 01 2009
fijiaaron

Error: Weak references are not implemented in the version of perl at

14 01 2009
fijiaaron

it looks like the performance issue is not an issue anymore (after yum update?)

but tests still fail for installing catalyst with the error message above.

14 01 2009
fijiaaron

Here is the redhat bug about performance:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=379791

14 01 2009
fijiaaron

proposed fix for perf problem (this has been rolled in to updates already)

http://www.karan.org/blog/index.php/2008/09/08/slow-perl-on-centos-5-potential-fix

14 01 2009
fijiaaron

upgrading perl (into /usr/local) with sources from cpan was painless, but still get errors and can’t install catalyst.

19 01 2009
fijiaaron

http://cynici.wordpress.com/2008/06/27/centos-52-update-broke-perl-catalyst/

Solution: Run “force install Scalar::Util” in cpan shell.

19 01 2009
fijiaaron

something happened to west1 — cpan started over and it looks like nothing is installed.

19 01 2009
fijiaaron

and now Catalyst installed just fine — as far as CPAN is concerned

4 04 2009
icfun

Perl is the best scripting language for Text processing and handle regex. I have posted few articles related to those at my blog

http://icfun.blogspot.com/search/label/perl

Also Perl’s Cpan has lots of support that I don’t even need to think extra while developing project. I didn’t find such help on other programming language except Java and .NET

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