Not As Clever As I Thought I Was

[Dave Cross]

I thought I was being pretty clever earlier this week. Turns out I
wasn't and this might serve as a cautionary tale for anyone else
considering such cleverness.

Most of the work I do is Perl development and it bothered me slightly
that the version of Perl available for FC2 is two minor versions
behind the current release (5.8.3 vs 5.8.5). Poking around on the
Fedora download server over the weekend I found a 5.8.5 rpm in

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development/i386/Fedora/RPMS/

So I downloaded it and installed it. Everything seemed to work fine
for a couple of days.

Then, earlier today, I needed to restart Apache because I'd changed
some configuration stuff. But it wouldn't restart. There was some
binary version incompatibility in DynaLoader.pm. "Aha!", I thought, "I
just need to update mod_perl as well". I did this, and mod_perl-devel
as well for good measure. That didn't solve the problem. So I looked
at upgrading the various apr-* rpms as well. At that point I got into
dependency hell as one of these rpms needed a new version of openldap
and that was going to affect a large number of other rpms on the
system.

So I backed everything out and went back to the original versions of
everything. It all works again now.

But it raises a couple of questions in my mind.

1/ The perl-5.8.5 rpm should probably have complained that it wouldn't
work with my existing mod_perl rpm. Is there a dependency missing
there.

2/ Why isn't there a Perl 5.8.5 rpm that works with the FC2 release?

Cheers,

Dave...