Helping Perl Packagers Package Perl

jamie writes "chromatic has a great post today on the conflict between OS distributions and CPAN's installations of perl modules, along with some suggestions for how to start resolving this maddening problem: '[Though Debian has] made plenty of CPAN distributions available as .debs, I have to configure my CPAN client myself, and it does not work with the system package manager. There's no reason it couldn't. Imagine that the system Perl 5 included in the default package... had a CPAN client configured appropriately. It has selected an appropriate mirror (or uses the redirector). It knows about installation paths. It understands how to use LWP...' The idea of providing guidelines to distros for how to safely package modules is a great one. Could modules request (a modified?) test suite be run after distro-installation? Could Module::Build help module authors and distro maintainers establish the rules somehow?"

Comments

FreeBSD - one step ahead

[adri]

FreeBSD already does this! Installing a package via cpan will create the metadata and register a FreeBSD package.

CPAN was both why I started using perl and stopped

[Fished]

The problem is module dependencies... any non-trivial module now has so many dependencies now that it is almost inevitable one will fail to install. And than you're kind of screwed (unless you go and build it b hand.) And then there's the insanity of auto-updating perl itself to get a module. CPAN's badly broken and needs to be replaced entirely, which is a lot of why I pretty much quit using perl for a long time. Recently, my job changed and I got a lot of perl code. Man, I miss Ruby now.