in reply to telling users how to get CPAN modules

I am used to installing programs by source, which is quite simple, and usually goes like this: download, extract tarball, read README, run configure, make, make test (or make check etc), make install (as root). The good thing with CPAN is, that the same technique works with CPAN modules, so I didn't have to learn anything new to install a CPAN module.

I don't quite know how installing your software works. If it works the same way, that is, it is a source tarball, then whoever installs the software must know this process already, so I recommend using the same way (no need to install the CPAN module). This may still be difficult to do for someone who only installs from debs/rpms so don't know how to install a program from source.

You could also make a tarball of your program that has the CPAN modules inside it and configures+makes them automatically when you install the program itself (but if the modules are large relatively to your program, you should give a source tarball without the modules too.).

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Re: Re: telling users how to get CPAN modules
by bcrowell2 (Friar) on Mar 21, 2004 at 03:12 UTC
    Yeah, I wouldn't consider it an especially difficult piece of software to install, for somebody who is familiar with installing source tarballs. It's just that I've tried to insulate them from that a little, so that all they really have to do is 'make depend ; make install', and all the dependencies will just automagically get satisfied.

    I talked again to the particular person who e-mailed me earlier today, and he's using yum (an rpm-based system) on Whitebox Linux (a fork of Red Hat), and I guess is used to installing everything from binary rpms. I don't know why he didn't have CPAN.pm installed; maybe I'm worrying needlessly based on something borked in this particular guy's Perl installation.

    It's a little spooky distributing open-source software, because you can't tell whether the people who e-mail with problems are 1% of your users or 99% :-)