Re: Quick start guide for CPAN

[Matthias Keller]

Hi Bob
Bob McClure Jr wrote:
On Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 10:07:16PM +0200, Matthias Keller wrote:
 

<>Hi Bob
Bob McClure Jr wrote:
Feel free to contact me to explain anything unclear or solve any
mysteries.
     

*raising me hand*
There's one question I'd like to have answered concerning CPAN...
I once had a problem that I upgraded some package which in turn lead to 
some starting errors in apaches mod_perl...
Is there any way to uninstall/rollback an upgraded package?
I did have to reinstall the whole perl package on my machine to get the 
old version back as I didn't find any other way...?
   

Not that I know of other than going to CPAN and manually downloading
the preferred older version, and doing the usual four-step process
(perl Makefile.PL, make, make test, make install) manually.
 

Thanks for the hint - should one uninstall the other one first and if 
yes - how?

That may be a good reason to use the "ask" option to following
dependencies, especially if using an older version of Perl.  If it
wanted a newer version of some module that's bundled with Perl, then
it will happily upgrade Perl for you.  I have to say I prefer to do
that one manually.
 

Well, I'm always using the ASK option... I just like that 'r' function 
that conveniently tells you for which modules there's a newer version.
Curious as I am I just upgraded every module that looked interesting to 
me *G*
On this way I happeded to upgrade 'CGI' from 3.00 to 3.05 which (only 
sometimes, strangely!) prevented apache (mod_perl respectively) to 
start.... ( It died with the error 'Undefined subroutine CGI::end_form' )
Guess I just have to be a bit more careful with those update 
recommendations *G*

Matt