[CentOS] PERL module woes

[Karanbir Singh]

Bowie Bailey wrote:
> Jim Perrin wrote:
>>> In fact, the quality of the perl-related rpms from Red Hat is
>>> the main reason I'm not using RHEL and using CentOS
>> Your logic is confusing to me. It does not resemble what I would
>> consider to be rational thought.
> 
> I think I understand what he was trying to say.  When I built my last
> system, I decided to go with rpms for everything.  It worked great
> until I got to the Perl modules and then it fell apart.

details please :)

> Every time I have tried to install Perl modules from rpms, it quickly
> evolves into a massive game of "find the missing dependency".  Either
> the module I want can't be found anywhere, or when I do find it, it
> depends on a module that can't be found.

that sounds like a broken repo, have you raised the issue with the repo
maintainers ? if so, do you have some specific bug numbers / issue
reports highlighting this issue ?

> I finally gave up and decided to use CPAN for Perl modules.  It is
> simple, and work amazingly well.  It does cause some annoyance when you
> get other rpms that have dependencies on Perl modules, but that is a
> problem that I have only seen once or twice.

CPAN has a boatload more mod's than rpm based repo's do at this time,
then there is the issue of matching perl versions and other fluff around
them. Rpm based repo's try to address this issue as much as possible and
try and do this in a way that relates more from the app -> dep end ( in
that pick the app, then build the perl dep tree under it ) rather than
just mass build cpan modules into rpm's. I suppose it would be a good
effort, if someone can do this sort of a thing for a stable distro like
CentOS.

> 
> There is a program that will create rpms from CPAN.  I considered it
> and then rejected it as being WAY too much trouble for the number of
> modules that I typically deal with.

cpanflute, is perhaps the app you are talking about. It _can_ do some
fairly sane .spec's but you do need to know whats going on and in 30 -
40% of the cases, need a minor tweak to make things all good.

while we are all talking about perl modules, there is a move underway on
rpm development to get depsolving against cpan installed perl modules (
and similar stuff for python and ruby etc as well ), but its not there
in CentOS - so if its a proper homogenius system you need and want to
track ( every good systemadmin should, imho ), rpm based perl mod
installs is your best bet. And in a lot of the cases, asking on the
right list, issue tracker, will get the desired results.


-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : 2522219 at icq