in reply to CPAN doesn't understand continents

I'm having the same problem. Unfortunately, entering a non-number doesn't help. CPAN is acting like it doesn't know about continents anymore. 
Select your continent (or several nearby continents) [] A
invalid items entered, try again
Select your continent (or several nearby continents) [] *
invalid items entered, try again
Select your continent (or several nearby continents) [] 
Sorry! since you don't have any existing picks, you must make a
geographic selection.

Select your continent (or several nearby continents) [] 1
invalid items entered, try again

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Re^2: CPAN doesn't understand continents
by Anonyrnous Monk (Hermit) on Jan 20, 2011 at 21:50 UTC

    What version of CPAN/Perl do you have?  (The code shown above belongs to what ships with Perl 5.12.2 — older versions had rather different code...)

    Update: just checked that the CPAN which shipped with Perl 5.10.1 (v1.9402) looked very much the same, so yours must be older.  For example, with Perl 5.8.8, the respective code read just: 

            @nums = split (' ', $num);
        my $i = scalar @$items;
        (warn "invalid items entered, try again\n"), next
            if grep (/\D/ || $_ < 1 || $_ > $i, @nums);

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      No help from me, but I am having the exact same problem . Nothing works ( 5 "North America" "NA" "US" ... ) . Something must have broken recently . I remember using CPAN a couple of years ago and it worked ( tedious , but it worked ) .

      Would someone suggest a fix for this or suggest another way to install DBD::Oracle ? 

      [root@hoqaweb1 ~]# cpan -v
cpan script version 1.03
CPAN.pm version 1.7602
[root@hoqaweb1 ~]#

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        To debug the issue, I would print out @nums and @$items  (i.e. modify CPAN/FirstTime.pm1).  Then you'll know which direction to look further.

        Maybe there's some non-whitespace junk char in $num ... e.g.: 

        use Data::Dumper;  $Data::Dumper::Useqq=1;

my $items = [ qw(foo bar baz) ];
my $num = "1 2\0";

@nums = split (' ', $num);
print Dumper @nums;
my $i = scalar @$items;
(warn "invalid items entered, try again\n")
    if grep (/\D/ || $_ < 1 || $_ > $i, @nums);

__END__
$ ./picklist-test.pl
$VAR1 = 1;
$VAR2 = "2\0";
invalid items entered, try again

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        Or @$items has not enough elements (or is empty)...  There isn't really a lot that could go wrong in the test.

        ___

        1 If you don't know where it is,  perl -MCPAN::FirstTime -le 'print $INC{q(CPAN/FirstTime.pm)}' will tell you (use double quotes on Windows).

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Re^2: CPAN doesn't understand continents
by Anonymous Monk on Jan 21, 2011 at 20:42 UTC
    Same problem here, just tried to initialize CPAN on two different systems, 1) A Macintosh running OS 10.5.8, and a CentOS 5.5 box. Both have not used CPAN yet on them, I get the identical errors on both of these systems. On the Mac I get this before the error. 
    Your ftp_proxy?  
Your http_proxy?  
Your no_proxy?  
You have no /Users/adam/.cpan/sources/MIRRORED.BY
  I'm trying to fetch one
CPAN: LWP::UserAgent loaded ok
Fetching with LWP:
  ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/MIRRORED.BY

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    On the CentOS box I get this (slightly diff tool used to download the MIRRORED.BY list) 
    Your ftp_proxy?  
Your http_proxy?  
Your no_proxy?  
You have no /root/.cpan/sources/MIRRORED.BY
  I'm trying to fetch one
LWP not available
CPAN: Net::FTP loaded ok
Fetching with Net::FTP:
  ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/MIRRORED.BY

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    Which obviously makes it seem that the problem is with the downloaded MIRRORED.BY file.
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