Making sure all CORE Perl Modules are Installed on Oracle Linux

Question

I am pretty careful to use CORE Perl modules -- the modules that are documented in http://perldoc.perl.org -- whenever I can. For example, I use Time::Piece rather than DateTime or IO::Uncompress rather than Archive::Zip.

We have thousands of Chef managed servers, and we can guarantee a particular version of Perl is installed, but it becomes a nightmare to guarantee that particular CPAN modules are also installed.

Imagine my surprise when a script failed on a new server because Data::Dumper wasn't installed. That module had been part of the CORE modules since the very earliest versions of Perl 5.

I found out that Oracle Linux Release 7 (which is modeled after RHEL 7) divided up the standard Perl packages, so the base Perl no longer installs all of the CORE modules.

What RPM packages do I need to install on Oracle Linux Release 7 (and probably RHEL 7) to guarantee all CORE Perl modules are installed?

Answer 1

On RHEL 7, you have to install these packages:

• perl: includes the Perl interpreter, perldoc, and a subset of the core modules

• perl-core: the rest of the core modules

I'm guessing Oracle Linux 7 is the same because there's a perl-core-5.16.3-286.el7.x86_64.rpm in the public yum repo.

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If you want to be doubly sure, you can check what perl-core provides by installing yum-utils and running:

repoquery --requires perl-core

(perl-core is just a meta package that lists a bunch of other perl-* packages as dependencies)