Trying to install PerlMX ( http://www.activestate.com/Products/PerlMx/ ) Install of PerlMX fails with: Checking Perl version... found Perl v5.6.0 PerlMx requires a Perl built with ithreads support, which you don't seem to have enabled. Please rebuild Perl with: Configure -Dusethreads -Duseithreads or simply install the latest version of ActivePerl. ActivePerl is available from: http://www.ActiveState.com/Products/ActivePerl/ I'm giving up now. Thanks for your interest in PerlMx. ------ I would rather use the perl that comes with RH!
Rebuilding Perl with thread support would break compatibility with existing modules which are built for Perl without threads, and for this reason probably can't be done until the next major release.
I rebuilt the RH 7 perl rpm with thread support. It works well. It is true that other perl components had to be rebuilt, I used the CPAN shell for that. Some warnings when updating DBI but it all runs nicely.
we would break backwards compatibility with modules users have compiled that aren't installed via RPM (and thus we cannot errata them).
Hm, this would seem to mean that no additional functionality could ever be introduced into perl, at least not the RedHat version? There are some real problems with the perl threading support though, it makes perl slower and many (most?) modules are not thread safe. Currently it is a greater problem for me that RedHat, even in RH 7.2, does not come with the most recent version of Perl, 5.6.0 is not the latest version and many modules installed through the CPAN.pm module thus tries to upgrade perl to 5.6.1, this is quite annoying.