[CentOS] PERL module woes

Fri Jun 2 13:06:35 UTC 2006
Dag Wieers <dag at wieers.com>

On Thu, 1 Jun 2006, Paul Heinlein wrote:

> On Thu, 1 Jun 2006, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> 
> > Installing perl modules from CPAN absolute worst possible solution and
> > should be used only as the absolute last resort.
> 
> When I get to the point that I absolutely must have a CPAN module that
> conflicts with or requires extensive tweaking of the system Perl installation,
> I fall back on the virtue of laziness. :-)

In light of all this (but unrelated) it may be nice to know that we've 
recently stopped providing perl-CPANPLUS and perl-Extutils-AutoInstaller 
from the repositories because of 2 reasons:

 + No package should rely on it (I fixed the ones that have been committed 
   with it as BuildRequires, ugh...)

 + No person in his right mind should install it, let alone manually. If 
   someone wants to break his set of dependencies on his system, make him 
   suffer to get there. (That's not really the intent, but still we should 
   avoid it happening accidentally)

It is so easy to create your own CPAN packages that there really should be 
no reason why you could not package it yourself.

If you require specific versions and you have trouble building them based 
on one of our SPEC files, let us know on packagers at lists.rpmforge.net.

If you require a CPAN module that is not yet available from RPMforge, 
request it from suggest at lists.rpmforge.net

And if you have some spare time because all the CPAN package are already 
available, think about helping others with their request for packages.

I'd like to have a better procedure to build packages, but if you're 
somewhat technical you should get far by simply taking:

	perl-Apache-ASP.spec	(for arch perl packages)
or	perl-Compress-Zlib.spec	(for noarch perl packages)

then change by hand what is necessary. (look at the SPAN site for most 
of the meta-information). Then try to rebuild it using:

	rpmbuild -bb <spec-file>

And if it generates a package and it can be installed. Send the SPEC file 
to the suggest at lists.rpmforge.net.

Dries has been doing a lot of work to provide as much as possible, but 
we may not know where we can best spend our efforts.

PS There is a good reason to use these SPEC files as a basis instead of 
using one of the auto-generating tools. We provide perl packages for a 
wide range of distributions from a single SPEC file.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]