Perrin Harkins wrote:
I hear you, but I think anyone who is building a serious web app is
better off compiling the important parts (apache, perl, mod_perl)
themselves. The options that the packagers choose are intended to
meet the needs of the largest cross-section of users, not to work
well for you. They also tend to lag way behind, which is a serious
problem for mod_perl 2 since it has gone through important changes in
the last few months.
Debian provide a tested, stable environment, usually with added security
factor. We rolled our own once to solve the libc6 2.7 memory bugs that
hit Perl, to be bitten by intermittent and obscure interaction bugs
(MySQL/Perl mid-query dropping db connections etc). We persevered for
two months but went back to stable in the end.
ModPerl2 suffered badly, as the last minute namespace change screwed too
many dependents and never made it into the Sarge release, which was
three years in the coming... :(
The Debian bed-of-roses is usually fab, but does provide some thorny
issues i.e. stability vs security is one they endlessly revisit (whew
look at the recent Thunderbird/Firefox issues!). In the mean time, we
are stuck with PHP4.
Any other suggestions/ comments/ recommendations?
David
www.backports.org will be your friend soon. Updated packages compiled
using the stable compiler/libraries. Lots of folks are waiting for a
working Debian stable Apache2/ModPerl2 combo. The last I heard was end
of September....
Fingers crossed,
Jeff
