I'm currently a developer for an on-line publication using Apache /
mod_perl / Mason. We currently have about six developers working on the
project and I have been running into problems with concurrent work on the
Perl libraries that power our site.
We use CVS to manage revisions, but the only way for a developer to see if
their code is working is to run it on our webserver. However, mod_perl's
very purpose is to keep one copy of your modules loaded from the
start. StatINC addresses this problem to a certain extent, but it fails
when you have multiple versions of a Perl module that you want to load
depending on which user is requesting.
I sort of got around this by modifying my Mason handler to examine the
requested URI ( ex. /dev/user_name/blah.html ) and loading the appropriate
module for that user. Basically, this involved modifying the @INC
paths in the handler, requiring the modules, and then calling
the StatINC handler sub to reload any modified modules. This sort
of screams hack and it never worked that well. Processes would
load the proper module for one user, and then use that same module
to serve another user who was looking for his own modules. Chaos
ensued...
I have a few ideas as to what I should try next. Perhaps limiting
RequestsPerChild to 1, such that libraries don't get reused? I don't know
what the ramifications of this are.
Short of running a webserver for each user (a bad solution in my
opinion) does anyone have ideas?
Thanks,
Brian Ferris
