Prerequisites for CPAN.pm distroprefs

martin has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Each time I install a new perl5 release for testing, I pull in a couple of additional modules, tasks and bundles to feel at home. Bundle::CPANxxl and Test::Reporter::Transport::Metabase are among these.

I use the CPAN module and have a couple of special rules in my distroprefs directory (o conf prefs_dir). Distroprefs can apply local patches, fine-tune the build environment and prevent installations from turning interactive.

Although my CPAN configuration in ~/.cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm is shared among all perl instances, newly installed perls seem to ignore my distroprefs, however. Only after the Bundle::CPANxxl modules are installed, distroprefs seem to be effective. I have observed this with new builds of perl-5.26.0 on Debian GNU/Linux 8.

Now here is my question: If indeed a missing module prevents CPAN.pm from using its distroprefs, what is a minimal set of non-core modules that need to be installed in order for distroprefs to be working? I would like to reduce the risk of bootstrapping headaches by installing those first.

Comment on Prerequisites for CPAN.pm distroprefs

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Re: Prerequisites for CPAN.pm distroprefs
by martin (Friar) on Jun 04, 2017 at 03:26 UTC

If indeed a missing module prevents CPAN.pm from using its distroprefs, what is a minimal set of non-core modules that need to be installed in order for distroprefs to be working?

It turns out that YAML alone makes the difference. Installing this makes *.yml files in distroprefs usable.

As an alternative, the CPAN documentation describes a way to convert YAML files to Data::Dumper format, which should work out of the box. I'd be able to patch YAML or its dependencies via distroprefs that way.

To make expect rules work, too, Expect should come next, I guess. Fortunately, distributions needing expect rules are getting rarer these days.

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