Not As Clever As I Thought I Was

[Kurt Hansen]

Dave Cross wrote:
> 
> If I was that concerned, I could just build Perl 5.8.5 from source.
> But that would also mean building my own mod_perl. And that's a can of
> worms that I'd like to keep firmly closed.

Actually, it's not that tough to build your own mod_perl. The 
documentation is very good. It's even gotten a little easier with 
mod_perl2/Apache2. In fact, from what I've read on the mod_perl mailing 
list, the rpms for mod_perl from Red Hat have always been so buggy that 
the greater headache would be using those! :-)

The main pain, though, is that you do have to read the documentation to 
make it easy. I find this helpful, though, since mod_perl is so critical 
to my business that I want to understand what's going on. Also, the 
documentation is really excellent and the mailing list truly top rate.

To tell you the truth, the main reason I decided against Red Hat path 
and am going with Fedora is the poor quality of the versions of mod_perl 
and apache rpms that were shipped with RH. I always ended up removing 
them and building my own. So, why pay for their "stable" system which 
was unstable for me?

> I decided a year or so ago that wherever possible I'd stick with rpms
> supplied by my distribution. Generally that makes life much simpler.

A good rule of thumb. However, wrt mod_perl, this is one place where it 
is not possible. :-)

YMMV

Take care,

Kurt Hansen