Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 56325
Perl is badly out of date - should be upgraded immediately to version 5.6.1
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:38:18 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Description of problem: The perl version that comes with redhat 7.2 is badly out of date. It's version 5.6.0, which has many critical documented bugs and segfaults frequently under many circumstances. Many modules won't work with 5.6.0 reliably and using the CPAN shell for installing many common modules will attempt to automatically update to 5.6.1, which is very undesirable. I realize it's a bit of a pain because many other things are based on Perl, but 7.2 should *really* get an update to at least version 5.6.1 for all things perl-related. Please????????????? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Install rt2 from http://www.fsck.com. (A very painful process with perl 5.6.0) 2.Run the system. 3.Get some Rt2 web pages. Actual Results: After a few page loads, Apache will start to segfault because Perl is segfaulting. Expected Results: No errors. Additional info: If absolutely required I'll try to find more specific test-cases for this bug, but considering that the problems with Perl 5.6.0 are actually documented all over the web in mailing list archives, I think moving to 5.6.1 should be an obvious choice even without condensed test-cases.
Here here, couldn't agree more. Every major Linux distribution has had perl-5.6.1 for some time now: SuSE since Wed Jun 20 2001 Mandrake since Apr 9 2001 PLD since Apr 12 2001 Vinelinux since Jun 15 2001 Conectiva since Sep 16 2001 Then what exactly is the reason to still ship a perl version that has all the shortcomings described above (and I can attest to every single one of them) ? This really makes me wonder: why are all bugs reported here left as NEW ?? Is it really too much trouble to even put in one line saying `sorry we're still working on this' or `security' or whatever. Really, anything is better than just ignoring the issues. This must be company policy then. Ah wait, here's the answer in the latest python.spec: Name: python Obsoletes: perl HTH
5.6.1 is now available in rawhide