I have a piece of software I wrote (a GUI using Perl/Tk), which has some dependencies on CPAN modules. Does anyone have any suggestions on what mechanisms I can provide for users to get CPAN modules? I currently have two simple installer scripts, one for Unix and one for Windows. The Unix one does a 'use CPAN;' and then gets the relevant stuff. The Windows one uses Active State's PPM system. I believe my users are probably split more or less evenly between Windows and Unix, or perhaps a little more on the Unix side.

With my current setup, I'm getting e-mails from Linux users who run into problems. My software is open-source, so I have no way of knowing what percentage of users are actually having problems, but I'd like to make it easier for them. For instance, I got an e-mail today from a Linux user (he didn't specify what distribution) who tried running the installer script, and had a problem because he'd never installed CPAN.pm. Of course it would be obvious to us Perl programmers how to fix that problem, but to him, it was completely mysterious. It's nice that CPAN is cross-platform, but getting CPAN set up in the first place is nontrivial for many users. (The number of configuration questions it asks is just astounding, and it's not necessarily true that you can give the default answer to every single one.)

It was interesting doing a Google search on my software, because I found that people had made Red Hat RPMs and Debian .deb files for my software. It would be great to just depend on each user community to do something like that, but what ends up happening is that, e.g., the latest .deb on the web is an older version with known bugs. I use FreeBSD myself, and it's not practical for me to create and test separate versions for every Linux distribution.

Any suggestions on a sane way to proceed?

In reply to telling users how to get CPAN modules by bcrowell2

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