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Re: OpenBSD or FreeBSD for a Perl web app Production platform?by graff (Chancellor) |
on Sep 22, 2006 at 00:30 UTC ( [id://574280]=note: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
I don't have any experience on OpenBSD, so I have no clue how it might differ from FreeBSD. Based on my experience with Perl on FreeBSD, I'd have to say there are things that can go wrong too easily.
What heppened to us on more than one occasion was that there would be a "normal, routine" update or patch or release upgrade of the OS, and suddenly a lot of perl scripts would stop working, because the version of /usr/bin/perl had suddenly changed (unannounced to the perl programmers), this somehow involved a change of "standard" paths in @INC (because /usr/lib/perl5 is organized by version, even inside site_perl), and a lot of non-core modules were suddenly not being found. When these "transitions" happened, there would be momentary panic, then all manner of diverse, inconsistent corrective measures (TMTOWTDI showing its dark, monstrous side), and an enduring sense that the perl environment as a whole was dreadfully fragile. (Problems were sometimes amplified when various hosts on the local network -- servers and workstations sharing the same nfs volumes where someone might run the same script in a shell on any machine -- would somehow end up with different perl versions and different module inventories. But that's more a matter of sysadmin behavior, not anything intrinsic to the choice of OS.) Maybe it was just pilot error on the part of the guys who were playing sysadmins when the troubles happened, or maybe our group as a whole was just missing a something fundamental about managing Perl in a non-simple FreeBSD network, or maybe it really is something that's hard to get right. I wish I knew. It's also entirely possible (maybe even likely) that none of this would be relevant or at all likely in your situation.
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