OK so maybe one of the perl experts on this list can give me an answer to this. I frequently have to write perl scripts of various sorts and get them over to customer machines. Sometimes they need to access various modules from CPAN like DBI::DBD and DBD::mysql. What I'm finding recently is that there is a perl builtin module called Data::Dumper which is increasingly becoming a pre-requisite for various other things, and also a fairly useful module in itself. Now, according to my perl installation which is currently 5.6.0, the Data::Dumper module is already there. Fine. When using the perl -MCPAN -e shell code to fetch the other modules, it gets a module list. That module list seems to think that Data::Dumper is stored in the perl-5.6.1.tar.gz file which of course it is, but upgrading my entire perl system and re-building all of my other modules isn't something I want to do just to install a MySQL module, especially when I have a perfectly OK version of Data::Dumper already installed. What the upshot of this is is that every time I use CPAN to install DBD::mysql on a client machine, it downloads and recompiles perl. I haven't found a way to stop it doing this, and on a system with limited bandwidth it's a pain in the arse. Personally, I think that whoever decided that the entire perl system needs to be upgraded to include an already existing module needs to be taken out and shot, and the module entry for Data::Dumper is just plain wrong. Nobody at CPAN.org appears to want to respond to my e-mails about this, and I guess they just think that everyone should go and get the latest perl now (despite the fact that a perfectly good and working version of perl is on my system already). I'm just about to dump perl completely as a programming language because of this and other issues with CPAN. Does anyone have any way of getting around these dependency issues, or at least telling CPAN to ignore them? The help within the CPAN module is, at best, limited. Del -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://slug.org.au/lists/listinfo/slug
