The Daves Collective

YoSucker, OpenSSL and Why Perl Sucks
2003-11-11 16:05

There's a new YoSucker out. I noticed this because once again YoSucker threw an infinite loop on me, and I didn't notice for more than an hour (the price of improved scheduler responsiveness) and my CPU temp got up to 58.5. So I went looking at the mail archives and the answer turns out to be the Perl module IO::Socket::SSL which needs to be reinstalled against a new version of OpenSSL (and those seem to be coming out far too often these days). Why the **** is this so? How was I supposed to know this? How does Perl (as an interpreted language in a dynamically linked environment) manage to combine the disadvantages of compilation and static linking? Why is its failure mode so insidious? Why Why Why?

Of course the advice in the mailing list turns out to be a tiny bit inadequate; it is necessary to force a reinstall of the module, like this (and don't get me started on finding documentation about the commands in the CPAN shell) -

perl -MCPAN -e 'force install IO::Socket::SSL'

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