[csw-maintainers] apache 1.3 retirement?

[Geoff Davis]

On Nov 16, 2010, at 10:22 AM, Peter Bonivart wrote:
> Does anyone know if our RT works at all? With all the changes to Perl
> and all the modules needed by RT, who can tell?

I'm not sure. The Blastwave (pre-fork) version was hopelessly out of date and required Apache 1 when we were evaluating it in September 2008, so we went with a hand-rolled version of 3.8.1 using the Blastwave mod_perl 2.x under Perl 5.8.

We stopped using RT at my site about a year ago (we replaced it with Jira) but kept an instance around in read-only mode for reference. When we went to migrate our old read-only RT server to a new Zone instance this past August, it didn't work. As I didn't attempt the migration myself, I don't know exactly which perl module(s) were the problem.

From my experiences with trying to keep multiple versions of RT 2.x and 3.x alive over the past 8 years, I can say with some authority that RT (and it's tight dependency HTML::Mason) is incredibly finicky about the explicit Perl module versions that it uses. This makes it a nightmare for the end-user sysadmin and I would imagine for the CSW maintainers who want to keep things current. For this reason, the servers on which RT ran eventually NEVER got CSW package updates because the module upgrades would break RT on a regular basis if given a chance.