Comments and questions about the FreeBSD ports collection follow.

Do you prefer to install modules using the FreeBSD ports collection over the CPAN module install? I do.

Of course sometimes CPAN modules aren't in the FreeBSD ports collection. Doing a CPAN install will have dependency modules installed by CPAN even if they are in the ports collection.

An example, in January of 2005 Test::WWW::Mechanize was not in the ports collection. Test::LongString,required by Test-WWW-Mechanize, at that point was already in the ports collection.

So when I installed Test-WWW-Mech using CPAN, it also pulled in Test::LongString.

What do you do when you want to test drive a module not in the ports collection? Recently I wanted to test drive CGI::Prototype. It's not in the ports collection, nor is Treemap, another module I've recently played with.

When I test drive a module, I install using a non root account in ~/myperl via CPAN. I explore the module in question and if I like it, I take a peek in ~/.cpan/build/ and see what else was installed. If it doesn't look to hard, I do the dependencies by hand.

By the way, Test-WWW-Mech entered the FreeBSD ports collection soon after version 1.0.

One great automated package management system plus another great automated package management system equals almost the same work as no automated package management system.