I’m excited to be speaking at the Boston Perl Mongers meeting this Tuesday 9 October 2012. I”ll post slides and a summary next week but I thought that I’d post an abstract here as a teaser. If you’re in Boston and are interested in attending the talk information on the Boston Perl Mongers meetings is available here.
Abstract:
Managing Complexity With Perlbrew and Carton
Deploying Perl programs to multiple systems can be challenging. Even when they run the same operating system version, different systems often contain different versions of the same CPAN modules. Different module versions are often incompatible in subtle ways that may not be detected immediately. In the worst case, software works fine on the development machines but malfunctions in production.
Things are even more complicated when deploying to different operating systems or different versions of the same operating system. Different distribution versions may contain different version of the system Perl and on many systems, the distributed Perl version lags the latest release. Writing for the oldest Perl version on all deployment systems means missing out of newer features, which reduces programmer productivity, and makes code less readable and reliable. Perl has excellent backwards compatibility but some differences still exist. Ubuntu LTS versions are often still in use after the Perl they distribute is no longer supported by the Perl community. Because Perl is deeply integrated into Debian and Ubuntu systems, vendor patches are usually limited to security issues, and manually upgrading the system Perl is difficult and risky. Thus users of older distributions may encounter program cashes due to internal bugs in a system Perl that they cannot patch nor upgrade.
This talk will show how Perlbrew and Carton can be used to address these problems. I will discuss how the Media Cloud project used Perlbrew and Carton to decouple the system Perl from the application’s Perl and achieve a consistent environment across different machines running different operating systems.
Nice Post… Just adding that pearl monks community will also be helpful for such kind of topics..
Heard about it a bit late, else would have surely attended the session, as I also hold fair bit of interest in the topic you have chosen. I agree to your point that deploying to any other system than the previous or even opening new branches in the current one is a difficult task and needs to be dealt with technical care and background knowledge about the system. If not the case, one can easily create a lot of difficulty.
great post with amazing suggestion! Deploying Perl programs to multiple systems are really challenging. I also think that different operating systems or different versions of the same operating system is must be complicated and approximately it will be unable to continue, however thank you.