OT: Whose packages to use?

[Fairlight]

When asked his whereabouts on Fri, Apr 28, 2006 at 01:32:41AM -0700,
> Have you ever needed a CPAN package that required more up-to-date versions
> of supporting packages than the vendor supplies?  Or perhaps needed a more
> current version of the dreaded Berkeley database routines (I say dreaded
> because the code is truly ugly with the number of #ifn*defs and version
> dependencies).

Have you ever needed a ***WORKING*** version of perl that doesn't segfault
on a simple function call?  [It's either int(), return(), or sort().]  I
had to install perl 5.8.x by hand in parallel with RHEL 3's because you
don't dare replace it unless you have a few days to check the dependencies.

> Commercial Linux distributions tend to be out of date they day they're
> shipped, and getting fixes into them can be difficult.  We won't even get
> into the situation on commercial Unix systems.

I'll vouch for that.

mark->