Ubuntu – the easiest way to update perl on Ubuntu 8.04LTS

Chroot's on linux are not for security, if you have root, or mount abilites inside a chroot it's easy to break out.

You should obviously drop root using su or similar, as long as the script doesn't have permissions to modify the interpreter files there shouldn't be a problem.

To do this you need to add a larger hunk of code in a copy of su, and the core bits of PAM.

Something like jailkit might be an easier way to manage this:

http://olivier.sessink.nl/jailkit/index.html

I've spent near 4 days fighting with this issue and here's the setup that finally got me there:

• don't use macports
• use the stock perl, with a twist:
  • Snow Leopard ships with 2 perls: 5.10.0 and 5.8.9 - switch to the earlier version like so:

% export VERSIONER_PERL_PREFER_32_BIT=yes

% defaults write com.apple.versioner.perl Prefer-32-Bit -bool yes

% defaults write com.apple.versioner.perl Version 5.8.9

• download the 32bit version of mysql from dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/ ("Mac OS X ver. 10.6 (x86, 32-bit)")
  • Find the instructions on Google - I just put the extracted directory in /usr/local and linked /usr/local/mysql to that directory
• CPAN seems to prefer the 5.10.0-specific install locations, so I downloaded DBD::mysql from search.cpan.org and did the usual install:

% perl Makefile.PL

% make

% sudo make install

UPDATE:

• In order to get CPAN to get its config from the right perl version, and to get Apache to run perl CGIs with the right perl version, use the following command instead of the last one in the above list:

% defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.versioner.perl Version 5.8.9

You'll have to be an admin to do this. After this, HUP apache and you'll be all set.