CPAN is a network of copies of a computer archive. I usually use CPAN when installing Perl modules. I rarely use CPAN.pm nor its bin/cpan wrapper. "Automation", of course, refers to modules like CPAN.pm (bad name), CPANPLUS (worse name), App::cpanminus, and probably others and their command-line components.

I'm sure none of these automated wrappers around CPAN are dependent on their own, separate tracking of what they have installed. You can install one module "by hand" (usually via 'make') and another module via cpanminus and then CPANPLUS will see both of them there just fine and be able to tell what version they are and be able to upgrade them or determine that they don't need to be installed or upgraded for some other module that you are installing that depends on them.

It, of course, gets rather tedious to install a module "by hand" if that module requires the installation of a huge number of other modules. But my experience says that it is usually wise to avoid those types of modules anyway. So it is only very rarely that I have much motivation to try automation.

But I'm not trying to tell anybody to avoid automation as much as I do. I just encourage you to install some modules by hand.

- tye        

In reply to Re^3: install fails for Inline::C (hide errors) by tye
in thread install fails for Inline::C by Special_K

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