740385 - Figure out the best way to upgrade to Perl 5.12 on bugzilla.mozilla.org

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(bugzilla.mozilla.org :: Infrastructure, defect)

Description

[David Lawrence [:dkl]]

Even when we upgrade to RHEL6 on the production BMO boxes, RHEL6 still only ships Perl 5.10.x. We really need to be running Perl 5.12+ to fix some issues that are occurring on BMO. This can be accomplished in a couple ways, either creating our own yum repo with custom built perl rpms built for RHEL, or using something like perlbrew and having a custom perl binary on each server but that may not be easy to maintain.

This bug will be a tracker to block bugs that are caused by running an outdated Perl version.

Once we figure out what path we want to take to reach this goal, we can move this bug over to Server Operations to get the code actually installed.

dkl

Comment 1

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Historically, Bugzilla always used a different version of Perl than the one that shipped on the system (back when bugzilla.mozilla.org was hosted on Solaris).

Anyone remember the #!/usr/local/bonsaitools/bin/perl in the #! line on all the files prior to version 2.16? :)  mod_perl makes this easier, since the #! is totally ignored, and we get whatever version is loaded into Apache.  The cron jobs and mail daemons are the only place we'd have to worry about it, and we can always change those to invoke the perl interpreter specifically instead of depending on the #!.

The mega-downside of installing our own Perl is it means a decent-sized chunk of packages have to be installed from source, too.

Comment 2

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

ActiveState distributes a version of ActivePerl 5.12 (and 5.14) specifically for RHEL 6 which installs into /opt/ActivePerl-5.12/  According to their installation docs it comes as an RPM, but I can't find the RPM for download anywhere (only the tarball)

Perl libraries for this need to be installed via ppm rather than yum, however, mirroring a PPM repository can be done (we used to build a few PPMs for Bugzilla prerequisites for Windows folks back before any of the common repos had them).

Writing a PPM provider module for Puppet probably wouldn't be that hard (I can't find an existing one)

That's one option anyway.

Comment 3

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Found it, it's in http://downloads.activestate.com/ActivePerl/releases/5.12.4.1205/

Same download path as the tarball, just change the .tar.gz to .rpm

Comment 4

[David Lawrence [:dkl]]

(In reply to Dave Miller [:justdave] from comment #3)
> Found it, it's in
> http://downloads.activestate.com/ActivePerl/releases/5.12.4.1205/
> 
> Same download path as the tarball, just change the .tar.gz to .rpm

Seems that version is no longer available but they do have 5.14.2 and 5.16.1 available for x86_64 in rpms. Could we install at a minimum 5.14.2 instead of 5.12.4? Seems we would still get the benefits of running the more modern Perl than what is shipped with RHEL6.

dkl

Comment 5

[David Lawrence [:dkl]]

(In reply to Dave Miller [:justdave] from comment #3)
> Found it, it's in
> http://downloads.activestate.com/ActivePerl/releases/5.12.4.1205/
> 
> Same download path as the tarball, just change the .tar.gz to .rpm

Seems that version is no longer available but they do have 5.14.2 and 5.16.1 available for x86_64 in rpms. Could we install at a minimum 5.14.2 instead of 5.12.4? Seems we would still get the benefits of running the more modern Perl than what is shipped with RHEL6.

dkl

Comment 6

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Out of curiosity, is Red Hat having to deal with this issue on their Bugzilla?

Comment 7

[Simon Green]

(In reply to Dave Miller from comment #6)
> Out of curiosity, is Red Hat having to deal with this issue on their
> Bugzilla?

No, we are still running RHEL 5 and perl 5.8.8 that is part of that version of RHEL. We do plan to move to RHEL 6 at some stage, and will use perl 5.10.1 once upgradef. Our internal machines are all running RHEL 6 / perl 5.10.1

  -- simon

Comment 8

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

(In reply to Simon Green from comment #7)
> No, we are still running RHEL 5 and perl 5.8.8 that is part of that version
> of RHEL. We do plan to move to RHEL 6 at some stage, and will use perl
> 5.10.1 once upgradef. Our internal machines are all running RHEL 6 / perl
> 5.10.1

Yeah, hence the issue.  See comment 0 and the blocking bugs. I figured since Red Hat would essentially be dogfooding their own OS they might have ideas how to fix the security problems that they never backported the fixes for in Perl (because they were invasive changes, not just patches).  Maybe we could convince someone to give us a perl update channel with the newer Perl in it so they don't have to deal with it on the main channel they don't want to touch.

Comment 9

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

I don't have any further information to add at this point.

Comment 10

[Amy Rich [:arr] [:arich]]

We don't have cycles to work on this.