So, I upgrade my Red Hat 9 install to Fedora Core 1, only to discover several instances of modules that have had their version numbers bumped to higher than that of CPAN, and whose implementations internally differ widely from their CPAN counterparts.
Additionally Test::Harness 1.40 refuses to pass all tests, and a quick e-mail dashed off to Andy Lester about it returnes his reply:
"Yeah, basically the default Perl install from Fedora has some goofed up header files. :-("
And interestingly it's Perl 5.8.1. What I'm *really* curious about is why on NONE of the repositories I've found so far for yum, is there one single instance of perl 5.8.2 or 5.8.3 available.
I'm *seriously* considering whether or not I want to try grabbing the perl *src.rpm for Fedora, and hacking the .spec, and jacking in the 5.8.3 tar.gz, and seeing what happens.
I've never built Perl from source before so the experiment alone will probably teach me more about my system than I'm really ready to know. heh.
I'm really curious about the fact that there's no updated rpms, considering the bugs fixed and the rapid release of so many new updates to the initial Perl 5.8.0 -- that would hint to ME at least that some serious bugs warranted fixing ASAFP .. so why don't *I* have them yet, via the rpms ? *argggggggghhhh*
And then you have the issue of there being so many additional modules *separated* from the initial Perl install that have to be grabbed via apt/yum/up2date, or just selected at install time. I really don't grok the logic behind why some of them are separated out and not part of the default install.
I mention the absence of 5.8.3 in updates to some of the #fedora people on irc.freenode.net and all I got were blank looks along the lines of "why do you need _that_?" or "is there something critical in that that you _need_?"
How about BUGFIXES? Security updates? Stimpy you eeediot!!
I mean, particularly if we're all going to be so gung-ho about using UTF-8 as the *DEFAULT* in /etc/sysconfig/i18n, you would THINK that someone would feel that the UTF-8 handling bugs that were fixed would warrant a further release.
