On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 3:47 PM, Filipe Brandenburger <filbranden at gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 18:36, Al Sparks <data345 at yahoo.com> wrote: >> I'm trying to install [...whatever...] using CPAN. > > DON'T! > >> 3. Lastly, here's the error I get when I attempt to install >> Pod::Simple through CPAN: > > That's why you should never use CPAN on a RHEL/CentOS box. Famous quote by Jim Perrin: "CPAN on rpm based machines is EVIL in so many ways it's not even funny. To start, nothing installed via cpan identifies itself to the rpm database, so anything you install which depends on a perl (CPAN) module will fail because of missing dependencies. If you install something via CPAN and upgrade the perl rpm for some reason (a perl upgrade is released which translates regex into plain understandable english perhaps) it's entirely possible that it will overwrite things installed via cpan. This will cause you headaches down the road. In addition, if a cpan module gets overly greedy with its dependency build, you can end up with a broken or otherwise non-working perl install. It's much better to use the perl modules in the rpmforge and c.k.o repositories, or cpan2rpm, or cpanflute. These will not interfere in such a manner." ( http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2007-February/033001.html )