The CPAN format is normal tar.gz files, i.e. files that are packed together with tar and then compressed with gzip. How to install them manually is explained in http://www.cpan.org/modules/INSTALL.html.

You don't need to search for repositories, because you can just download the packages from CPAN. For example if you go to http://search.cpan.org, type CGI into the search field and then click on CGI::Minimal, you will find a link to the package on the right side under "Download:"

If you download it, decompress and unpack it, you will find inside the top directory a file README, with the following contents:

CGI::Minimal

An _extremely_ lightweight CGI processing package 
designed to provide form decoding and related
services with low overhead.

To install:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

Alternatively, if you have Module::Build installed,

perl Build.PL
./Build
./Build test
./Build install

See 'perldoc CGI::Minimal' for the documentation.

[download]

And what the CPAN shell does is the above, just automated (complete with download). If it is pure perl essentially nothing else than some copying of module files to their proper place under /usr/lib/perl5 (or /usr/local/lib/perl5 or ...) happens. If there are C-sources included, those have to be compiled, but 'make' does that automatically for you

If you install with apt-get, the compilation of C-sources was already done for you. The format is called rpmdeb and is in essence the packed and compressed files and information where the files have to be stored.

PS: When you say "I want to install without CPAN", do you mean without the automatic shell that is started when you type in "cpan" or do you mean without accessing this central repository that is called CPAN? The first is easy to do even though it removes much of the comfort of using perl. The second is impossible because CPAN is just THE central and exclusive repository for perl. There are some bigger packages that have their own website and might even allow download separate from CPAN, but that's not the common case

In reply to Re: Help needed with terminology - different formats of modules by jethro
in thread Help needed with terminology - different formats of modules by Anonymous Monk

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