CPAN.pm and CPANPLUS.pm both have features for automatically following dependencies -- that's the main advantage over manually typing the build commands.

Also, they both support Module::Build based packages, as well as the older ExtUtils::MakeMaker style.

When we finally get to the stage where nearly everyone is using CPAN/CPANPLUS (or some similar system of automatically dealing with dependencies, e.g. Debian's debs via apt-get), then life will get much easier for CPAN authors. At present there's a direct trade-off between modularity and ease-of-adoption, because if your module depends on a dozen other modules, a large percentage of the perl users out there will give up on the "download & install" grind before finishing.

Update: Caveat: Forgot about Module::Install, which is a nice hack to alleviate this problem.

In reply to Re^2: CPANPLUS broken custom sources by doom
in thread CPANPLUS broken custom sources by zerohero

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