Perl dependency issue

Question

I've installed CentOS 6.3 (i386) recently.

It has two perl binary

/usr/bin/perl (v5.10.1)
/usr/local/appx/perl/bin/perl (v5.8.8)

My question: Is it possible to install some other funtinonality to that application using system wide perl & perl's module from that appx?

Like below:

./configue -prefix=/usrl/local/app_xyz -perl_lib_path=/usr/local/appx/perl/lib/5.8.8/

I've tried the above, I got error the following error:

RRD Perl Module -----------------**Not Found**

But that perl module RRDs.pm is available under the /usr/local/appx/lib/5.8.8 directory.

Also the configure script doesn't have ARG to map our appx perl binary path (/usr/local/appx/perl/bin/perl), it automatically picks the system wide perl as default.

Answer 1

Perl 5 minor versions are backward compatible, so a 5.8.8 module should work with a 5.10.1 perl (but there is an exception, see CAVEAT below). The include path (@INC) is configured in when perl is built, but @INC can be modified by individual programs, and globablly the content of the environment variable $PERL5LIB is prepended.

export PERL5LIB=/usr/local/appx/lib/5.8.8

However, there is a problem with this approach. Because $PERL5LIB is prepended to @INC, doing this will cause the 5.8.8 directory to take precedence when loading various standard modules. That's not desirable.

So, a less tidy but ultimately better idea is to just symlink /usr/local/appx/lib/5.8.8/RRD.pm (and/or the RRD directory, if there is one) into /usr/local/lib/perl5 or some other standard @INC directory. You can see those with:

perl -e 'print "$_\n" foreach @INC'

Note that there may be both a top level RRD.pm and a parallel RRD directory; if so you want to symlink both.

CAVEAT

Some perl modules include parts that are compiled from C, and these may break. If RRD.pm does not use C, then you don't have to worry. If it does, you should copy it instead of symlinking it and rebuild; for that you need the source, which may or may not be there :(