[rancid] Rancid 3 documentation tweak

[Howard Jones]

The README for RANCID 3.0 says that perl5 or greater is required to run
RANCID. In fact, it's perl 5.10 or greater, which is significant for
some. For example, current CentOS 6 (and I guess RHEL and Scientific
Linux too) come with perl 5.8.8, so it requires a separate perl install
just for RANCID. (installing it over the system perl leads to fighting
between CPAN and yum)

Related: a configure option to specify the location of the perl
interpreter would be handy!

Cheers,

Howie

[heasley]

Post by Howard Jones
The README for RANCID 3.0 says that perl5 or greater is required to run
RANCID. In fact, it's perl 5.10 or greater, which is significant for
some. For example, current CentOS 6 (and I guess RHEL and Scientific
Linux too) come with perl 5.8.8, so it requires a separate perl install
just for RANCID. (installing it over the system perl leads to fighting
between CPAN and yum)

thanks; i'd missed that. Any clue why, from my pov, they're so far behind?
5.8 seems ancient.

Post by Howard Jones
Related: a configure option to specify the location of the perl
interpreter would be handy!

put it on the todo list; until then you can PERLV_PATH in your environment,
make distclean, and reconfigure. in general, this should work for most
configure variables for any package's autoconf scripts. sometimes you must
get kinkier and set the variable that autoconf uses, eg: ac_cv_path_PERLV_PATH

[Howard Jones]

Post by heasley
thanks; i'd missed that. Any clue why, from my pov, they're so far behind?
5.8 seems ancient.

Part of the "enterprisey" nature of RHEL is that they promise no
breaking changes within a major version. They backport security fixes,
and leave out language feature changes. RHEL 7 is just about out (and
the others typically lag behind it by 3-6 months on a major release), so
we're right at the end of a release cycle. CentOS 5 had similar problems
with a really old PHP 5.1 and Python 2.4

Howie

[heasley]

Post by heasley

Post by heasley
thanks; i'd missed that. Any clue why, from my pov, they're so far

behind?

Post by heasley
5.8 seems ancient.

Part of the "enterprisey" nature of RHEL is that they promise no
breaking changes within a major version. They backport security fixes,
and leave out language feature changes. RHEL 7 is just about out (and
the others typically lag behind it by 3-6 months on a major release), so
we're right at the end of a release cycle. CentOS 5 had similar problems
with a really old PHP 5.1 and Python 2.4

even 5.10 seems ancient. stability through antiquity.

i may have a way around the requirement for 5.10. ISTR 5.14 taking issue
with some syntax deprecated in 5.12. i'll try it, but make no guarantee.