I've seen autobundle, I've seen other "find installed modules" scripts. Also various "modules used by this script", App::FatPacker, and Module::CoreList. But why don't things like cpan and cpanm have a $HOME/.cpan/installed.log? A log of successfully installed modules/distributions (maybe with a timestamp)? I made a quick hack to App::cpanminus and got something like this: 

Successfully installed IO-String-1.08
Successfully installed IO-All-0.43
Successfully installed CPAN-Meta-2.112150 (upgraded from 2.110440)
Successfully installed Perl-Tidy-20101217
Successfully installed Data-Dump-1.19

[download]
Am I missing some tool or configuration option that makes cpan/cpanplus/cpanminus leave a log of successful installs? Hopefully in a format that would be easy to 'replay' when upgrading to the next version of Perl.

Update:

cpanm's build.log file is overwritten with each run so it only contains the last set of modules installed. (this is why I hacked it up to log success messages to a separate log file.)

cpanp's install-logs logs are also done on a per-run basis. (a virgin install of say IO::All just leaves a IO-All log, not both IO::String and IO::All. It also doesn't have a simply greppable line that can be matched to provide a useful list. (its "success" messages are "[MSG] [Tue Aug  9 23:05:37 2011] Installing /home/lando/perl5/lib/perl5/IO/String.pm", which would vary with install location an require munging to get back to just IO::String or IO-String.

I'm looking for a simple persistent log of successful installs, so if on a freshly brewed Perl I were to install IO::All, the log would have: IO::String, IO::All. And then months later when a new Perl arrives I have a list of modules installed in the order they happened (including dependencies).

In reply to Is there a cpan/cpanm install.log? by zengargoyle

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