I have just recently gotten a shell account at IO.com. The nice thing about this is that I can finally have a non-work related place to play with some of my CGI coding.

They have perl 5.005_02 with the standard distro. This includes CPAN.pm. I like CPAN.pm and tend to use it as much as possible to install modules since it notifies me of dependancy issues, etc. In preparing to use it last night, I was reviewing the documentation on how to use it with a NON-root account. It talked about global settings in the CPAN/Config.pm module and how these could be over-ridden in a ~/.cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm file. But there was no example of what a MyConfig.pm file would look like.

So, being the do-it-yourself-er that I am, I attempted to write my own MyConfig.pm file. I tried the following:

use CPAN::Config;
$CPAN::Config->{'cpan_home'} = '/home/j/johannz/.cpan';
1;
[download]

After some mucking about and experimenting I finally got things to work. But the MyConfig.pm that CPAN.pm wrote just overrides everything and does not use the global settings file at all it looks like.

$CPAN::Config = {
  'build_cache' => q[10],
  'build_dir' => q[/home/j/johannz/.cpan/build],
  'cpan_home' => q[/home/j/johannz/.cpan],
  'ftp' => q[/usr/bin/ftp],
  'ftp_proxy' => q[],
  'getcwd' => q[cwd],
  'gzip' => q[/bin/gzip],
  'http_proxy' => q[],
  'inactivity_timeout' => q[0],
  'index_expire' => q[1],
  'inhibit_startup_message' => q[0],
  'keep_source_where' => q[/home/j/johannz/.cpan/sources],
  'lynx' => q[/usr/local/bin/lynx],
  'make' => q[/usr/bin/make],
  'make_arg' => q[],
  'make_install_arg' => q[],
  'makepl_arg' => q[],
  'ncftp' => q[/usr/bin/ncftp],
  'no_proxy' => q[],
  'pager' => q[/usr/bin/less],
  'shell' => q[/usr/local/bin/tcsh],
  'tar' => q[/bin/tar],
  'unzip' => q[/usr/bin/unzip],
  'urllist' => [q[ftp://cpan.nas.nasa.gov/pub/perl/CPAN/],
   q[ftp://ftp.cpan.org/CPAN/],
   q[ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/perl/CPAN/],
   q[ftp://ftp.sunsite.utk.edu/pub/CPAN/]],
  'wait_list' => [q[wait://ls6.informatik.uni-dortmund.de:1404]],
};
1;
[download]

So, is it possible to make this file really inherit the global settings and only override the settings I need to customize?
Anyone else have experience installing and configuring modules on a box where you are not root?