Re: [gentoo-user] Heads up - Perl upgrade borked spamassassin & fix, but still curious

[Holly Bostick]

Ow Mun Heng wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-12-06 at 12:03, Peter Ruskin wrote:
>
>>On Monday 06 December 2004 01:56, Nick Rout wrote:
>>
>>>This morning a perl upgrade from (5.8.4-r1 to 5.8.5-r2) borked
>>>spamassassin for me. There was a complaint from spamassassin and
>>>from sa-learn about not being able to find module HTML/Parser.pm
>
>
>>I found problems with sa-learn too after the update.  I remerged
>>spamassassin to fix it.  Then, to make sure, I ran
>>`/usr/portage/dev-lang/perl/files/libperl_rebuilder` - that took
>>ages and remerged all sorts of crap; I had to unmask or remove a
>>lot of stuff.
>
>
> Can I ask what's the purpose of libprel_rebuilder? There's no man-page
> for it. I've tried executing it as _normal_ user but permission denied.
> Don't want to experiment running it as root unless I know what its for.

Libperl_rebuilder, rather unsuprisingly, rebuilds all installed Perl 
modules against a new version of Perl. It's supposed to be for if you 
have a < 5.8 version and have upgraded to a > 5.8 version, but I find 
Perl seems flakey/sensitive enough that it's good to run it once in a while.

It takes a *really* long time, though-- it works in 3 passes, so it's 
very thorough, but quite slow (possibly depending on what modules you 
have installed; many modules install quite quickly, but gtk-perl alone 
takes a couple of hours, and it seems to be re-emerged twice, once 
during pass 2 and once during pass 3). I just ran it myself, and found 
that it basically moved the modules from /blah/blah/blah/5.8.5 to 
/blah/blah/blah/5.8.6, re-emerging them along the way.

But atm, I've got so many freaky breakages going on, it was worth it to 
me to cover all bases. And it's not like it *hurts* to do it (afaik); it 
just takes a long, long time.

HTH,
Holly

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