Q. Why would you want to do this?A. Because I am trying to adapt/modularize a program written by another developer which installs cpanm to a previously-cpanm-free environment for use in testing. I want to be able to use this program in environments where cpanm is already installed.
Q. Can you be more specific? What's the program you're trying to modularize?
A. It's a program I call 'khwdebug.sh'; sanitized version attached. It was written by Karl Williamson, an important contributor to the Perl 5 core distribution and to the Perl 5 Porters mailing list, to address particular bug reports filed on rt.perl.org.
Q. Which bug reports?A. Long-time Perl contributor Andreas Koenig tests CPAN modules against Perl 5 blead. When a CPAN distribution known to work on a released version of Perl 5 suddenly starts to fail tests when run against blead, a 'perlbug' process generates an RT ticket. The author of the CPAN distribution gets notified.
But it's often useful for people other than Andreas to try to confirm the test failure report. Karl Williamson (khw) wrote a program to do that. It is set up to run on the Perl 5 development server known as 'dromedary' which is donated to us by booking.com. I've started to run 'khwdebug.sh' on dromedary as well.
Q. What good will modularizing this program do?A. It will enable people who do not have access to the dromedary server to test CPAN distributions against blead more easily than they can do now. And it will enable us to determine whether tests are failing on platforms other than the Linux/x86_64 found on dromedary.
Q. Where does 'cpanm' come into all this?A. khwdebug.sh builds Perl 5 blead and installs it into a user-specified testing directory. Example:
dir=/home/jkeenan/testing/blead./Configure -des -Dusedevel -Uversiononly -Dprefix=$dir -Dman1dir=none -Dman3dir=none
make -j$test_jobs installkhwdebug.sh then downloads the fatpacked version of cpanm from the network and builds and installs it into the same directory as the blead 'perl' executable.
wget --no-check-certificate -O- -q http://bit.ly/cpanm |$dir/bin/perl - -v App::cpanminus
Remember: This is happening on a machine where 'cpanm' is not installed by default.
khwdebug.sh then uses that version of 'cpanm' to download a CPAN distro from a mirror and prepare all its dependencies.
module=Text::CSV::Hashify $dir/bin/cpanm --installdeps $modulekhwdebug.sh then makes use of the nifty '--look' option to cpanm to open a sub-shell, change to the directory where the CPAN distro has been unpacked, and prompt the user to run 'perl Makefile.PL' where the 'perl' in question is the recently installed blead:
echo "About to cd a work space directory" >&2 echo "From there, run '$dir/bin/perl Makefile.PL'" >&2 echo "And then, probably 'make test'" >&2 $dir/bin/cpanm --look $moduleThe user then creates a Makefile and runs 'make test' (or similarly if the distro uses Module::Build). The user can then confirm the test failure report and perform local debugging. The more confirmations we get from more platforms, the more we can be sure that we have a real problem.
Q. Alright, so what's the problem with 'cpanm'?A. When you try to do a bootstrapped installation of the fatpacked version of 'cpanm', it, not surprisingly, asks if App::cpanminus is already installed. If cpanm is already installed, then no additional version is installed into $dir/bin/. But at a certain point, khwdebug.sh expects to be able to find and use $dir/bin/cpanm. When that expectation is not meant, khwdebug.sh cannot proceed.
Thank you very much. Jim Keenan
sanitized_khwdebug.sh
Description: application/shellscript
