Upgrading Perl (modules) / RequestTracker

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I’m attempting to install RequestTracker on CentOS 6.5. Running “make testdeps” as recommended by RT’s installation guide, I’m presented with lists of missing Perl modules.

One of these lines reads:

Encode >= 2.39 …MISSING

Now, “yum whatprovides ‘*/Encode.pm’ ” informs me that that module is part of the core Perl distribution, and is installed on my system. Opening the file itself reveals:

# $Id: Encode.pm,v 2.35 2009/07/13 00:49:38 dankogai Exp $

so I know that I have version 2.35 of that module installed, and obviously that’s < 2.39. So I need to get 2.39 installed. What is the correct way to do this on CentOS? The last time I had to do anything like this, it was on a Debian box, I went through the process recommended by the guys in #perl, and was left with a broken system that was a real joy to piece back together…

8 thoughts on - Upgrading Perl (modules) / RequestTracker

  • Am Wed, 05 Feb 2014 06:23:25 +0100
    schrieb Chris :

    Well, there are also packages for FreeBSD. RT and all dependencies.

    The reason I wouldn’t just blindly install or update packages is that I
    don’t believe that even the Debian guys do sufficient testing to ensure that RT actually works after the update.

    This is, of course, a highly RT-specific discussion. But in defense of CentOS, I don’t see a fundamental problem running RT
    on it – actually, due to the long support-cycles, it might even be better suited than e.g. Ubuntu LTS. Ticketing-Systems usually have exceptionally long replacement-cycles. You just have to make sure you know what you are doing and find a usable change-management strategy.

  • Use Software Collections. There’s a newer perl inside software collections, that contains a newer version of Encode for this and will meet your dependencies. There still isn’t an rpm based installer for RT, but you’ll be able to do things in a ‘more correct’ way than overwriting the system perl via cpan bundle updates.

    –

  • Is there an overview of how software collections work somewhere? That is, how a user interacts with a choice of versions of the same thing?

  • Yes, see this link:

    https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Software_Collections/

    Obviously, any mention of RHN and subscriptions should be ignored and instead the setup to get software collections is:

    yum install CentOS-release-SCL

    Once the release package is installed, all the “yum install” directions in the documentation will work fine.

    (so that means my command above replaces Section 2.1 in the documentation, but the rest of the documentation is going to work correctly)