I just wanted to buzz in and be slightly more explicit. Debian doesn't understand Perl, and they don't care about CPAN. Debian hand-hacks stuff in the most virulent and ridiculous fashion: they'll open up a perl class, hack in an extra method, make random other methods die explicitly, and then they'll make your system dependent on it. I use CPAN too, and Debian as my primary distribution but that doesn't change a thing. They could for instance, subclass a module for use by the system into a ::Debian package, but instead they choose the dirty hack-it-in method which makes life difficult for those of us who want to simply get a job done. The Debian packages don't have to pass the natural tests, they're not published under the same namespaces, they don't change version numbers, and they're hardly sound improvements.
Debian will justify this because they want the system configured through /etc, and not at the whim of each individual author, but unfortunately that doesn't help us here, or people that depend on the non-debian behavoir. Use CPAN at your risk, it might work -- it might not. I do, and I feel comfortable saying most programmers on this list can probably navigate around the problems Debian creates, but for the end perl user, Debian is a horrible platform. -- Evan Carroll System Lord of the Internets _______________________________________________ List: Catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk Listinfo: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/