In response to my question, Ged Haywood pointed me at a message from Chip Turner, reproduced here in part:
> When it comes to perl and mod_perl, we've been working to try to make > sure it works reliably from RPMs. RH 7.3 should work well out of the > box, as should 7.2, once all errata applied. The rest of this thread > points out a few issues, though, but I think that tends to be issues > with other perl modules that have shared library components. If you > (or anyone else!) have specific failures or test cases you've seen, > though, I'll look into it and see if it is something we can fix. That "should" is a big big word, as I came across Mr Turner's message in a search of the list archives -- I'm currently working with a RedHat 7.2 box with all errata applied. All Perl-related RPMs were supplied by RedHat. And I get silent failure in the form of segmentation faults. So that's why I asked my original question. Can I expect that if we upgrade our web servers to RedHat 7.3, we'll be rid of the segfault problem? Or am I looking at rolling my own RPMs or installing from source RPMs? My suspicion, confirmed by Mr Turner, is that this is tied directly to shared libraries and toolchains, and so I suspect further that the problem will go away if I build everything from scratch using source RPMs. In the meanwhile, thanks to the people who have offered tips on building from source RPMs. Right now, it looks like this is the way we're going to go. And finally, thank you to the people who recommended (many in private messages) ditching RPMs altogether and installing from source, but unfortunately that's not an option, as I thought I had made clear in my initial post. One of the reasons we're using RPMs to handle configuration management is that we have several redundant servers in production and several servers for development use, and it's important that the configuration on each server be identical. It's also important that, if we add a new server to either group, we can produce an identical configuration to the development and production clusters. Charlton
