[davorg]

Yes. And I mention both of those commands in the article.

The point is that the standard perl RPM does not contain everything that you would expect to see in a Perl installation. And whilst I agree that it is simple enough to fix that situation, many people running low-end web hosting services don't realise that the standard Perl installation is stripped back and don't do anything to rectify this - as demonstrated by the example in my article.

I really don't mind Red Hat providing a standard stripped-down Perl RPM. I just wish they had called it "perl-minimal" or something like that, saving the name "perl" for the full Perl RPM.

[rwmj]

Well file a bug, I guess. The problem IMO is with the upstream Perl tarball which contains an ever increasing set of modules. The RPM packaging is (also IMHO) more rational.

The problem with dumb hosting providers is dumb hosting providers. I'm sure they'll find other ways to screw things up even if the package name was changed. Who uses web hosting these days anyway, when you can fire up a cloud instance and install whatever you like?

[davorg]

> Well file a bug, I guess.

That's not going to fix Centos 6 and 7 - both of which are mainstream in the web hosting industry right now.

And I've had this conversation with the Red Hat Perl packagers. They can't see the problem.

> The RPM packaging is (also IMHO) more rational.

To be clear, I also like the way that Red Hat splits the Perl RPM into individual RPMs for each module. My argument is only with the set of these RPMs that are installed alongside the main perl RPM.

> Who uses web hosting these days anyway, when you can fire up a cloud instance and install whatever you like?

Not you and me, of course. But I'm talking about people with no technical knowledge who rent some cheap web space and run a CGI guestbook program.

We could just ignore them. I suppose. Let them all switch to PHP. To be honest, I think most of them have already gone down that route.

[aaroncrane]

> the upstream Perl tarball […] contains an ever increasing set of modules

I don't think this is true. I count a total of 6 modules added and 10 removed in stable releases of Perl from 5.12.0 (that is, since Perl adopted its current release-management process). Corrections welcome if I'm miscounting, of course.