To our CentOS users

[jholder]

Dear Zimbra Community-

First off, thanks for all the feedback we've received in the forum. Its been great read the responses, and assist where we can. We especially thank the CentOS developers, for posting in the forums.

The fact is, we were incorrect in our initial post about a specific CentOS compatibility, and we owe you an explanation on how we came to the conclusion initially that it was a CentOS specific compatibility issue, as well as an apology.

CentOS4 and RHEL4 have a primary difference in how Scalar::Util behaves. This difference initially led us to believe that this was what was causing the problems that were being reported on CentOS. Rather than waiting on the issue, we posted a note (incorrectly) that CentOS had a known incompatibility.

We decided to install a test CentOS system with 4.5 and 4.6 to see if this was the case. The installs succeeded perfectly.

This still left us asking, "Where is this problem coming from?"

Today, we received two support cases with Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems experiencing the same problem. The customers were nice enough to give our development team access to the machine. The customer machines had a different version of Perl from an unknown source instead of the Perl shipped by the vendor. In this case, they had installed Perl 5.8.8, while RHEL4 is shipped with perl 5.8.5. Replacing the system version of Perl with a something other than what has been provided by the vendor can cause problems with a variety of perl modules, including Scalar::Util, as they rely on the underlying core modules to match what they were built with.

Unfortunately we never have had the opportunity to look at a CentOS system with the problem, but we believe this to be the root cause in those cases as well.

On the issue of support, it isn’t that you can’t run CentOS, it’s just that it’s not officially supported as a part of our release and QA engineering.

To the CentOS crowd: Thanks for keeping us engaged in the conversation. We apologize for initially declaring that CentOS was the root of the issue. The issue is NOT CentOS, but rather Perl. We were incorrect to jump to the conclusion quickly.

We'll be around to help any who are experiencing the Perl issue, and will do our best to help.

We've updated the bug to reflect the new information, and hope to have this particular issue fixed in 5.0.2, and it will be in the release notes for 5.0.1 as a known issue.
Bug 23495 - Check for non-standard perl and error out due to Scalar::Util issues

All The Best,
John, Quanah, and the Zimbra Team