On Sat, Jul 24, 2004 at 09:22:01AM +1200, Tom Munro Glass wrote: > > Thanks Bob for a very useful introduction to CPAN. > > What should you do on FreeBSD if you have already installed various perl > modules by other methods, specifically using portinstall/portupgrade? Should > those packages be removed with pkg_deinstall and then reinstalled using CPAN?
No. Just install over them. AFAIK the ports system does not use any kind of centralized database, a la RPM. I think the system is little more than a user-friendly wrapper around the usual drill of ./configure, make, make install. > Also, can you summarise what the advantage is of using CPAN compared to using > portinstall or other methods? I've not used portinstall enough to know how well it handles dependencies. One of my clients has their stuff hosted on FreeBSD machines, so that is my only exposure to the ports. I wind up not using them much because they don't keep very current stuff there. They have Perl v5.6.0 and SpamAssassin v2.44. Ugh. As for the other manual methods, all you have to do is try to install something that needs module A, and module A needs modules B and C, and module C needs, ... well you get the picture. I think SpamCopURI is a case in point. > Can CPAN be used in parallel with these other methods? The only problems I've found are with RPMs because rpm cares only about what's in the RPM database and ignores what's actually there. That can lead to problems when, say, you have Perl v5.8.0 installed by RPM, and then install v5.8.3 from the tarball. Then you do a (Linux) distribution version upgrade, which "upgrades" your Perl to v5.8.2. In a related note, RedHat installs Perl at /usr/bin/perl. The tarball, left to its own devices, will install to /usr/local/bin/perl. I intentionally let it do that once, to avoid the above scenario, and it nearly drove me nuts. (That's not a drive. It's just a short putt.) Install from the tarball to the same place as the RPM. In sum, on RedHat/Fedora Core Linux, I install the distributed Perl RPMs. You have to because many system utilities depend on them. Then I install additional (and upgraded) modules with CPAN. > Regards, > > Tom Munro Glass Cheers, -- Bob McClure, Jr. Bobcat Open Systems, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.bobcatos.com God promised a safe landing, not smooth sailing.
