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

I can't get ActiveState PPM to work. No matter what, when I try to install a package, it says it can't find a PPD file. If the package really does exist, it waits a llllooooonnnngggg time before saying it dosen't. Does anyone know what's wrong with it?

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Re: PPM Problems
by dws (Chancellor) on May 07, 2001 at 09:03 UTC
    Occassionally the ActiveState site goes down. And on rare occassions, they reorganize their site in ways that temporarily break PPM. One symptom of breakage is a failure to find anything.

    I'll wager, though, that you're behind some sort of proxy server. If that's the case, you need to teach LWP about the proxy server by setting up the environment variables. (Under the covers, PPM uses HTTP via LWP.) See ActiveState's PPM Documentation, and read the section on proxies and firewalls.

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Re: PPM Problems
by WebHick (Scribe) on May 07, 2001 at 17:10 UTC

    I had a similar problem a few months back on my laptop when I neglected to verify and upgrade the packages for quite some time. I couldn't install packages that I wanted to.

    First off, get into PPM and type verify. This will tell you if any of your packages are out of date. This will also tell you whether or not you're making connection with ActiveState. If it can't verify any of your packages, then you're not experiencing the same problem I was and you really need to follow what dws was saying above.

    But if it tells you that some of your packages are out of date, then that's the reason why you can't install packages. I found that when this happened, the only two I could actually install were PPM and SOAP-Lite. After that, the problem was fixed. If you can't install those packages, go up to The 6xx Repository and pick them up there.

    Sarah
    All non-Perl nodes will be eliminated. Fear is your only defense.

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Re: PPM Problems
by BigJoe (Curate) on May 07, 2001 at 17:16 UTC
    I get this every once in a while but what I do to keep this from happening is I open up the documentation and add all of the PPD repositories

    PPM>set repository Jenda http://Jenda.Krynicky.cz/perl
    PPM>set repository Roth http://www.roth.net/perl/packages
    PPM>set repository Achim http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/~ach/ptk/ppm
    PPM>set repository RTO http://rto.dk/packages
    Sometimes the modules you are looking for are mirrored.

    --BigJoe

    Learn patience, you must.
    Young PerlMonk, craves Not these things.
    Use the source Luke.
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