[CentOS] scripting CPAN installs

Wed Apr 21 15:55:34 UTC 2010
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On 4/21/2010 9:00 AM, Alan McKay wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 9:26 AM, Tomas Ruprich<ruprich at uikt.mendelu.cz>  wrote:
>> http://www.developertutorials.com/tutorials/cgi-perl/automate-perl-module-deployment-050426/page4.html
>
> I am curious if you or anyone else is doing this.   I spend all day
> yesterday on it - the scirpts as given just simply do not work and are
> far too simplistic - so I expanded upon them quite a bit but still
> find this method does not work.
>
> This is still an issue for me unfortunately - I like the idea of the
> above approach where I keep all the module tarballs on hand and build
> them myself manually.  But I cannot seem to get it to work.  The above
> article for example makes no mention about what to do about modules
> that want to include other modules.


If you are going to put any work into it yourself, you really should set 
up a local yum repo and either copy in rpms from epel/rpmforge if they 
exist or use a CPAN->rpm tool to build them if they don't or you want 
something newer.  Then installing on any target machine is just "yum 
install list_of_packages" which is easy to script and will always have 
reproducible results.

If you don't use this approach, you'll have 2 problems.  (1)Modules that 
you've installed via CPAN may get updated by yum rpms by dependencies 
you don't know about, possibly installing older versions that won't work 
with newer CPAN components, and (2) the CPAN modules themselves may be 
changed between times you run your scripts so you don't actually know 
what you are installing.  It is rare, but the dependencies among modules 
are occasionally refactored with the repository being in an inconsistent 
state for a while.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com