As promised here are the slides from my talk last week on Perlbrew and Carton.

carton_and_perlbrew

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.