perl and multilib considerations?

[Chip Turner]

Florian La Roche <laroche at redhat.com> writes:

> > Although please correct me if I am wrong.  It would be nice if this 
> > "problem" would go away one day, but it is a really non-trivial problem.
> 
> I thought Chip tried the last time to enable backwards compatibility,
> but it was an unknown how much would still break or needs rebuilding.

Module compatibility is easy :) Upstream takes care of it mostly, we
just need to ensure @INC is set up properly.  Some of the recent
rawhide changes should improve this even further, by exhaustively
including all the old perl dirs in @INC; much to my surprise, the perl
build scripts will only add things to @INC if they exist at certain
times in the build, etc, leading to sometimes unpredictable @INC
setup.  This should be patched and is on my TODO list.  There's still
an issue affecting multilib boxes, but it should be getting gradually
better.

Harder is maintaining backward compatibility for things tha -embed-
perl (xchat, gaim, mod_perl, etc).  I'm working on this with some ugly
symlinks, since the default perl embedding system uses -rpath off into
a version/arch specific hinterland directory.  This seems to actually
be working decently well so far, but needs more testing.  Ultimately
the hope would be a 5.8.3 errata for RHEL3, but that's a ways away.

Chip

-- 
Chip Turner                   cturner at redhat.com
                              Red Hat, Inc.