Hmmm, good point - I could do that. I've come across several methods of checking module versions and none of them seemed "perfect" to me. Can you recommend a method?
Well, depends if you are in Perl, or bash, but really something as simple as:
perl -e 'use HTML::Parser;' echo $?
Aside from the mess of Perl diag which you can redirect away, you'll get a 0 or not.
We don't do auto-updates on production boxes so this is not a concern. And yeah, my other alternative would be to do it all via yum instead of CPAN, but that would be a massive change to the system I've inherited.
Good lord no, I don't either:) But when you "do" update:) Shame about the inheritance issue, it's not hard to install modules out of the base location and pull them in, unless you have a mess to change I guess...