Well, Dave, I too favor choosing arbitrary data to illuminate a particular fact that my data set is incomplete on, mucho kudos :D (I'd have leaned higher in the order of 16.54% personally.)

however, I'm looking to build a build bot that will compile and install any and every module given, I already have a local mirror for the CPAN, I just want an easy way to install all the modules found. I realize, that OS and Arch specific modules won't build, I don't forsee much luck with Win32::API on a FreeBSD server, or getting that OS/2 File module to actually do anything on a Linux server. I guess anything that gives me a list of all the modules available on a CPAN mirror would be fine. I just need a list to iterate on is all.

Rather than trying to install everything, it's better to break your list down into manageable chunks. For example to install all modules beginning with "A":

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use CPAN;

print $_->install()
foreach CPAN::Shell->expand("Module", "/^A/");
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I usually break it down even further. For example, all modules starting with "Aa", "Ab", etc.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use CPAN;

print $_->install()
    foreach CPAN::Shell->expand("Module", "/^Aa/");

print $_->install()
    foreach CPAN::Shell->expand("Module", "/^Ab/");
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And for an entire namespace, say Catalyst:

print $_->install()
    foreach CPAN::Shell->expand("Module", "/^Catalyst/");
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Very nice!! Thanks these ideas will work very nicely.

If you do craft a solution that iterates over "everything", there's probably some prior art to learn from by looking at how the CPAN smoke testers discover and test everything.

You might want to pay particular attention to what the CPAN testers blocklist, because the most common reason for a smoker blocklisting a distribution is when they discover that the build process hangs nastily, or otherwise blocks forever. (I discovered that first hand when a mistake in one of my dists caused some smokers to hang.) Knowing which modules they consider impossible or too expensive to test will help you to avoid the same issues.




Dave