On 4/4/06, Cheryl Chase <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Apr 3, 2006, at 3:56 PM, Joel Rees wrote: > > > Even though it's not as necessary as it was when the system perl > > was at v5.6 and we all wanted the Unicode stuff in v5.8, I'm still > > inclined to build a separate install of perl for application use. > > That way I don't have to worry as much about fine-tuning what gets > > installed, and I find it's easier to get cpan to behave, as well. > > > > (Not that you can ever ignore what gets installed, but it's easier > > to protect the server if you keep the OS clean.) > > Are there OS functions that rely on perl? What sorts of things? > > Are there nice directions somewhere for setting up a separate install? > > Also, how does CPAN module determine what's installed? I hesitated to > just remove stuff from /Library/Perl until Ed told me to do so, > because I figured that CPAN was keeping some state info about what > was there. > > Thanks, > > Cheryl
CPAN has absolutely no idea what's there, precisely because users are expected to install and remove modules on their own. The 'official' way to install modules is to download the source, unzip, untar, make, make test, make install, just as with any other source project you might want to install on your machine. At some point, someone figured out that since Perl is so good ata automating things, there should be a script to automate module installation. And viola, the CPAN module was born. It's just a wrapper that auomates some common installation tasks, like installing dependencies, though; you don't have to use CPAN if you don't want to. Why you wouldn't would be a mystery, but you don't have to. A side effect of this is that, because cpan is designed to be a helper module/app, it doesn't keep much around other than it's own configuration info. If CPAN wants to know if a module is installed, it's just scans @INC for it. -- -------------------------------------------------- This email and attachment(s): [ ] blogable; [ x ] ask first; [ ] private and confidential daggerquill [at] gmail [dot] com http://www.tuaw.com http://www.dpguru.com http://www.engatiki.org values of β will give rise to dom!
