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

I know next to nothing about perl, and would rather avoid getting too deep into it, but I have been trying to set up the bbs sytem provided by the scoop project.

I seem to be having a problem with the install process though, and it seems to be related to the updating of perl modules.

If I run 
bash%# perl -MCPAN -e 'CPAN::Shell->install(CPAN::Shell->r)'

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I get 
CPAN: Storable loaded ok
CPAN: LWP::UserAgent loaded ok
Fetching with LWP:
  http://cpan.hambule.co.uk/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
Going to read y/sources/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
Could not pipe[  --decompress --stdout y/sources/authors/01mailrc.txt.
+gz
|]: No such file or directory at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0/CPAN.pm line 564
+2.

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and the scoop install crashes out with the same message. I've looked at the files but a CPAN.pm appears to be an unintelligible 7000 line script. or Shall I just give up?

update (broquaint): corrected formatting

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: CPAN problem ( I think)
by jasonk (Parson) on Apr 28, 2003 at 17:10 UTC

    It appears you answered 'y' when asked what directory to use for storing cpan information, so now cpan is trying to use a relative path to a directory named 'y' when reading the stored files. This may work, if you also answered 'y' when asked to create that directory, but because it is a relative path it will only work if you run CPAN from the same directory where you installed it. Try changing the cpan_home setting to a more reasonable (and fully qualified) directory name (run perl -MCPAN -eshell, then enter 'o conf cpan_home /home/me/.cpan' and 'o conf commit').

    We're not surrounded, we're in a target-rich environment!
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      Oh yes, I do have that directory (y) ;the first time I ran the scoop install it did go through setting up CPAN and it must have got in there then. It crashed out at a later stage, but of course this problem has prevented me from running it again since. I've no idea where Scoop installed CPAN, what should I be looking for? I've run your commands re: resetting the cpan_home setting, without any errors, but it hasn't made any diffrence. Thank you very much for your help though.
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Re: CPAN problem (gzip missing)
by VSarkiss (Monsignor) on Apr 28, 2003 at 18:13 UTC

    In addition to the excellent diagnosis by jasonk above, it looks like you don't have a "gzip" program configured. (The string after "Could not pipe" should contain the name of the program.) Try bringing up "perl -MCPAN -e shell", and use "o conf gzip" to add it.

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      Thank you
      I entered your suggestions without any errors, but the output 
      Going to read y/sources/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
Could not pipe[  --decompress --stdout y/sources/authors/01mailrc.txt.
+gz |]: No
such file or directory at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0/CPAN.pm line 5642.

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      remains the same.
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[d/l]

        When you typed "o conf gzip" did it show you a path to the executable? To be more specific, you should type something like o conf gzip /path/to/your/gzipto set the path that CPAN.pm will use to find gzip.

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