Haven't messed with RPMs for a long while (at Yahoo! we had folks whose job it was to provide the prebuilt system tools in the Y! format - among them, Mike Schilli of Log4perl fame who was our Perl packager), but today I'm building Perl 5.10.1 RPMS for our CentOS 5 systems.

I was able to take a 5.10.0 and adapt it pretty easily, with a few tweaks. First, because of the way CentOS lays out its include files, you need to patch IO.xs:

--- perl-5.10.1/ext/IO/IO.xs.0  2010-02-08 17:27:16.000000000 -0800

+++ perl-5.10.1/ext/IO/IO.xs    2010-02-08 17:28:11.0…

This subject really requires a whole series of posts, but for the moment I'd just like to lay out the basics of what's needed to integrate your Perl development process and Hudson.

First and foremost, you must be using some source control system. Doesn't matter if it's CVS, Subversion, Git, Mercurial, or Bazaar (Hudson supports all these), but you need to have this set up so that Hudson can both consistently check out your software and so that it can notice when to do another build.

Second, you need a test suite. It doesn't have to be perfect, or have 100% test coverage, but y…