Randy, Thanks for your help... I'm actually feeling a little stupid right now. I had obviously never looked in the tar.gz of that Prototype module. It turned out that all I had to do was put the .pm (the only thing in the tar.gz) in the right place, now it's working like a champ.
I had a suspicion that I wasn't using the "-b" option correctly. You guessed it, I was trying to identify the source location. I had tried it many other ways (including "plain jane"), however, all without any success. Is there a way to simply say, "Make a PPM from this source file I've already downloaded," to avoid the search mechanism altogether? I have to wish that many of the Win32 modules were more standardized and easy to work with. I see so many things in them that could be streamlined and made more programmer-friendly -- and isn't that why we make modules? Of course, this probably just means that those Win32 modules are waiting for me to get off my lazy butt and improve them or improve on them. :D Please also accept my thanks for everything you give to the Perl community. This is not the first time that you have helped me directly, to say nothing of all the less direct support you've generously given in the form of modules and repositories. My experience is that everyone complains non-stop, but very few people offer even richly-deserved praise. Here's your "Attaboy!" for today. Best regards, -Brian _________________________ Brian H. Oak CISSP CISA Acorn Networks & Security <http://acornnetsec.com/> -----Original Message----- From: Randy Kobes [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 14:17 To: Brian H. Oak Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: make_ppm used to work, no more On Tue, 8 Nov 2005, Brian H. Oak wrote: > Hi all, > > I have often used make_ppm.bat in the past to create easily portable > PPDs of modules available from CPAN. Since about two months ago, > however, make_ppm.bat hasn't worked at all. Please help diagnose and > fix this problem, since it is holding me up on several projects. > > I have included below typical CLI results when I try to run > make_ppm.bat, even when I've downloaded the module in advance. I have > also included a listing of the directory about which it seems to be > complaining, although the complaint is rather cryptic. > > > C:\.cpan\build>make_ppm --version > C:\Perl\bin\make_ppm version 0.75 > (Getopt::Long::GetOptions version 2.34; Perl version 5.8.7) > > C:\.cpan\build>make_ppm -f -b > C:\.cpan\build\Win32-API-Prototype.tar.gz Win32::API::Prototype The "-b" option is used for the binary location in the ppd file to specify where the associated archive file is located, not the source location. > Using Archive::Tar .... > Using Compress::Zlib .... > Using nmake .... > Using C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe .... > No results for "Win32::API::Prototype" were found at > C:/Perl/site/lib/PPM/Make/Util.pm line 659. What this means is that it couldn't find the distribution corresponding to Win32::API::Prototype from a soap call to a remote server, so it will now try the local CPAN indices ... > CPAN: Storable loaded ok > Going to read \.cpan\Metadata > Database was generated on Mon, 07 Nov 2005 22:02:59 GMT > Cannot copy \.cpan\sources\authors\id\: at > C:/Perl/site/lib/PPM/Make.pm line 241. and this indicates it couldn't find the distribution name in the CPAN indices, either (admittedly the error message is unintuitive). The reason for this is that the distribution just contains a blib/ subdirectory, and PAUSE ignores contents of a blib/ subdirectory when indexing, so nothing in the distribution is indexed. One thus wouldn't find it within the CPAN.pm shell. Do you have problems using this on modules that are in the CPAN indices (eg, Class::Classless)? At the moment PPM::Make relies on information that's in the CPAN/PAUSE indices, which is why it fails in this case (as it can't map module to distribution name). You can use it to install a distribution directly, as in make_ppm A/AB/ABC/def-0.123.tar.gz which will make the distribution def-0.123.tar.gz in the CPAN author directory ABC. However, this fails for D/DA/DAVEROTH/Win32-API-Prototype.tar.gz, as the distribution isn't a standard CPAN distribution (eg, doesn't contain a Makefile.PL or Build.PL). -- best regards, randy kobes _______________________________________________ ActivePerl mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe: http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/mysubs
