Helping Perl Packagers Package Perl

jamie writes "chromatic has a great post today on the conflict between OS distributions and CPAN's installations of perl modules, along with some suggestions for how to start resolving this maddening problem: '[Though Debian has] made plenty of CPAN distributions available as .debs, I have to configure my CPAN client myself, and it does not work with the system package manager. There's no reason it couldn't. Imagine that the system Perl 5 included in the default package... had a CPAN client configured appropriately. It has selected an appropriate mirror (or uses the redirector). It knows about installation paths. It understands how to use LWP...' The idea of providing guidelines to distros for how to safely package modules is a great one. Could modules request (a modified?) test suite be run after distro-installation? Could Module::Build help module authors and distro maintainers establish the rules somehow?"

Create a cpan package in your package manager

[MichaelSmith]

This module installs a tool which installs modules directly from cpan but enforces the conventions of the native environment. So if there is a perl module from the debian repositories called kludge and the same module is available directly from cpan, the cpan module would understand that they were the same basic thing, and know how to relate the different versions.

FreeBSD - one step ahead

[adri]

FreeBSD already does this! Installing a package via cpan will create the metadata and register a FreeBSD package.

CPAN was both why I started using perl and stopped

[Fished]

The problem is module dependencies... any non-trivial module now has so many dependencies now that it is almost inevitable one will fail to install. And than you're kind of screwed (unless you go and build it b hand.) And then there's the insanity of auto-updating perl itself to get a module. CPAN's badly broken and needs to be replaced entirely, which is a lot of why I pretty much quit using perl for a long time. Recently, my job changed and I got a lot of perl code. Man, I miss Ruby now.

Bug Report Time?

[hAckz0r]

Seriously, if Debian is 'breaking functionality' that makes part of their own distribution unusable, wouldn't it makes sense to file a bug report directly with Debian? While you are at it take all the Perl package maintainers and have them help elevate the priority of that bug report so they can't just ignore it. Having it officially declared a bug would be a logical first step.

g-cpan

[Deorus]

As usual, Gentoo is a step ahead of the competition in this regard (and has been for a long time):

jps@karma ~ $ eix g-cpan
* app-portage/g-cpan
          Available versions: 0.13.01 0.13.02 0.14.0 ~0.14.1_rc1 ~0.15.0 0.15.0-r1
          Homepage: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/perl/g-cpan.xml [gentoo.org]
          Description: g-cpan: generate and install CPAN modules using portage

Since Portage is only a collection of installation instructions, any kind of vendor package is suitable for it; this is unlike the primitive package managers that come bundled with every other distribution that still have problems with vendor packages as well as software which they have no license to redistribute.

Re:The problem is simple to understand

[perlchild]

I think it'd be nice if the perl/cpan crowd would release a "ready for production" subset of cpan, that would be built, then packaged into every distro. For the rest of us.