Okay I have just finished installing Titanium. I have had to restore from backup twice (or maybe it was more and I cannot count high enough). My hands are feeling warn out. And I have come to some conclusions.
- The current version of the CPAN module is better than the one the box came with. It has a "failed" command which helps you keep track of what needs to be done.
- It must be the case that a lot of modules do not state their dependencies correctly.
- In particular the compression modules should check for the underlying C libraries and bail out quickly if they are not there.
- What I really wanted was a way of typing one command (install Titanium) and getting a list of all perl modules installed. I want it to stop as soon as it hits an error but to only scream when there is a serious issue. I believe CPAN can do this, but I was too fed up to play with it anymore.
- I am not aware of any security mailing list for all these modules.
- Somebody did once organize an automated CPAN to Debian online converter but it seemed to have died last year.
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If you want to see what pre-requisites a module has, use the CPANdeps website. Or download and install CPAN::FindDependencies and use the cpandeps script that it installs. Both allow you to fine-tune the results to match your version of perl.
There is, unfortunately, no way of declaring non-perl dependencies, such as those on external C libraries or external binaries, such that CPAN.pm can just Do The Right Thing. If you think about it, it's a Hard Problem, as different platforms have very different ways of installing such things. But I can assure you, it is a problem that people are aware of. If you have any good ideas about how to solve it, one of the module-authors or perl-qa mailing lists are probably the best places to discuss them.
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