In order to maintain a consistant environment across all of our operating systems, the following guidelines are being set to assist UMBC sys-admins, and others, in building packages consistant in functionality across all systems. Tend towards the most default configuration of a package, as this provides for the most expected behaviour of a package, and also tends towards the most stable.
Shared libraries are nice.
Take advantage of them. Don't ever link perl against a shared libperl.so. Shared libraries suck. They make dependencies between packages creep up. Watch your back.