Installation gone crazy

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello wise perlers,

I am very much a newbie to perl. I was designing some cgi stripts when I thought that HTML::Template looked like a good package.

So I used perl with the CPAN package manager. I tried to install the newest version of HTML::Template, but it seemed to be dependant on a new version of perl than was on my server. So the manager downloaded the new version of perl5 and preceded to ask me questions. After a while I realised that I didn't want to install a new version of perl. So I quit the question asking process.

It then said that the make process had failed. I assume the questions were just generating a make file.

My question is: would this have changed anything on my system? and how can I find out?

Thanks for your time, Dave

P.S. how do I install HTML::Template without getting an updated perl version? Do I just need to find a version of HTML::Template that works on my version of perl?

Comment on Installation gone crazy

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Re: Installation gone crazy by tachyon (Chancellor) on Oct 14, 2004 at 22:53 UTC
Error and status messages are specific, it helps if you give accurate details. AFAIK CPAN does not try to upgrade the core Perl interpretter. It will try upgrade and initialize itself however and I suspect that this is what you actually mean. Type `perl -v` to see what version of Perl you have. As for changes there won't be any significant ones. Nothing really happens until make install and this won't happen without a successful make test, which won't happen until a successful make has occurred. The shrapnel (ie associated files) will be in ~/.cpan if you wish to delete them. See A guide to installing modules for how to manually install HTML::Template. Click the link to go to CPAN. Find the download link..... You will do something like: `wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/S/SA/SAMTREGAR/HTML-Templa +te-2.7.tar.gz tar xzf HTML-Template-2.7.tar.gz cd HTML-Template-2.7 perl Makefile.PL make && make test && make install` [download] cheers tachyon	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Installation gone crazy by herveus (Prior) on Oct 15, 2004 at 11:04 UTC
Howdy! Under certain circumstances, CPAN will (or has in the past) try to install a new version of Perl if the module dependencies are just so. I don't remember the details, and I think it may have been corrected in newer versions of CPAN, but... yours, Michael	[reply]