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Perl Modules as RPM Packages

Posted by michael on from the my-own-catapult dept.

libertynews writes "KPLUG President Kevin Pedigo has just announced his latest project -- RPMPAN, an archive of CPAN Perl modules in RPM format, generated nightly."

3 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Re:CPAN installs dependencies on the fly by eln · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Except this thing requires a network connection too! And CPAN, IIRC, is a standard part of Perl, so if you don't have CPAN, then you don't have Perl, and thus have no use for CPAN.

    In the FAQ, it states that the reasons for doing this are 1.) cool points and 2.) to hawk his book (okay he doesn't say that in as many words). Plus, it's written as a shell script, because shell scripts are portable. There is no explanation given as to why he couldn't have written it in Perl, since any system that would have any use for it at all would have Perl installed.

    So, basically, he's taking the awesome resource that is CPAN, making it less useful, less portable (RedHat only), more obtuse, and more prone to error (only "around 90%" of the modules work right). Yah, this seems like a really great idea to me.

  2. Re:Huh? by NightSpots · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Two things:

    1) CPAN isn't flawless: yesterday, I tried using it to install File::Temp and it tried upgrading perl from 5.6 to 5.8. That simply isn't the correct thing to do, under any circumstance.

    2) Having used FreeBSD, which has perl modules in the ports/package system, I can absolutely say that it's a nice thing to have. Being able to pkg_add a perl module in half a second, no compile time, no dependency hell, it's a good thing.

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  3. Re:perl with RPM lovin' ? by cowbutt · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The irony is that shared libraries make it *very* difficult to do a real small stripped down Red Hat installation.

    It didn't take me too long (and hour or so, maybe) to get a minimal server-ready RH8 installation down to 300MB. If I removed the documentation under /usr/share/doc and a few other bits, I could probably get that down to about 222MB (this figure includes Perl and a bunch of commonly-used CPAN modules, BTW, so it's actually a trade-off between "minimal" and "actually-useful" ;-)

    You can find the kickstart file in this thread.

    There are too many cascading dependencies. You would be better off compiling the stuff you want statically. You'd save space.

    Yeah, and then when a security problem is found, you end up having to re-compile the lot. Eww.

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