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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Debian Removes perlreftut 9 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Irrelevant (Score:2, Interesting)

    by sky (1411)
    The maintainers of perl for various platforms seem to all have failed to have working installations of perl anyways. At least I cannot remeber when I last used a system installed perl for anything I did or installed. It would all just break break break with things installed of CPAN.

    Frankly, it is just silly hair splitting.

    --
    sky

    • Re:Working Perl (Score:2, Insightful)

      by chip (65) <chip@pobox.com> on 2003.08.13 9:10 (#23074) Journal
      Package management systems like dpkg and rpm simply don't cooperate with CPAN. They need to know what files are installed and what packages installed them, and CPAN installations are far too undisciplined to report what's been installed and where (and, even more important in some ways, what's been removed). And then there are the dependency tracking issues.

      In short, if you use rpm or dpkg, you shouldn't be using CPAN in the first place. This has nothing to do with the skill or dedication of the packagers. It's a fundamental incompatibility.

      • Certainly in Debian, a few CPAN modules are packaged as libfoo-perl. There has been talk IIRC of a Debian-specific version of CPAN.pm or something similar which will inform apt (probably by wrapping the equivs package) when new perl modules are installed or upgraded by CPAN.

        It would in theory be possible to "automatically" convert every module on CPAN to a Debian module. Perhaps we need to set up apt.perl.org as some kind of automagic gateway ;)

        • It would in theory be possible to "automatically" convert every module on CPAN to a Debian module.

          In practice too. Well, not *every* module, but every module that is packaged in the standard way can be very easily compiled into a .deb:

          apt-get install dh-make-perl

          dh-make-perl --build --cpan Foo::Bar
          or
          dh-make-perl --build --cpanplus Foo::Bar

          You can supply --install if you want the new .deb to be installed immediately.

        • Re:Working Perl (Score:2, Informative)

          by nik (3476)

          It would in theory be possible to "automatically" convert every module on CPAN to a Debian module. Perhaps we need to set up apt.perl.org as some kind of automagic gateway ;)

          This is already possible on the *BSD systems, with a clever hack called BSDPAN. This is a modification to the Perl build on those systems that sticks some hooks in to the ExtUtils::* modules, so that 'perl Makefile.PL; make; make test; make install' also registers the module's files with the local package management system.

          BSDPA [pm.org]

        • I have just started to use and I am quite happy of cpan2rpm [arix.com], which of course could be enhanced in a number of ways.
        • Gentoo has done it already... i.e.
          #g-cpan.pl MODULE
          makes a .ebuild and installs the module
      • In short, if you use rpm or dpkg, you shouldn't be using CPAN in the first place I assume you mean that you should be wrapping CPAN modules into RPMs or DEBs for local use rather than using the CPAN.pm system to install. I would agree with that. If you're suggesting that you should not be using CPAN as a whole, then I would strongly disagree. That's what makes Perl as useful as it is!
        --
        Yet Another Just another perl hacker, // essays.ajs.com
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