For those who do not follow the link, the upshot is that rather than go with the standard released version, Red Hat decided to go and add random patches that were floating around. He discovered this because a Red Hat user ran into resulting bugs in the wild. The core Perl sources were patched in November, 2007, but Red Hat doesn't understand or care enough to issue a system update.

He's also really not happy that Red Hat tracks bugs in its bug tracking system but doesn't see fit to share information with the originating communities. So, for instance, when this bug in Red Hat's Perl (not in any version of Perl the Perl folks have released, but it is in Red Hat's version) had the bug reported they closed the bug report saying, "upstream patch". Which doesn't acknowledge that it was a patch they shouldn't have been integrating in the first place, and doesn't tell the upstream folks that there is a bug in an upstream patch that maybe, just maybe, they'd like to fix.

That said, I can understand Red Hat being cautious about replacing the Perl they ship. Lots of things depend on Perl, lots of things are compiled against Perl, and so even an innocuous looking patch has a possibility of creating its own bugs. There is a certain sysadmin mindset that looks at that kind of situation and says, "It is better to leave the problems we know about rather than create new problems." Of course when you combine that mindset with an, "Ooh, shiny!" attitude towards including unstable stuff and you get one of the reasons why I personally prefer Debian-derived distributions.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.