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

hi monks, I have installed ActivePerl-5.8 on Linux on my machine. But I am unable to get access to PPM - Perl Package Manager . How to install PPM and where can I get it? Is there any alternative tool to PPM. pls reply. santosh.

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Re: how to install ppm
by matija (Priest) on Apr 28, 2004 at 11:53 UTC
    PPM is an alternative packaging manager, which was designed because most windows machines lake a compiler.

    Most Linux systems, on the other hand come with a compiler, and can therefore compile the non-perl components of the Perl modules localy.

    The easiest method of installing modules under Linux is to run the CPAN module, like this:

    perl -MCPAN -e shell
    After some configuration questions, that should give you a prompt at which you can simply say
    install Some::Module
    and it will install the desired module. It will even chase down the module dependencies, if you configure it that way.
Re: how to install ppm
by periapt (Hermit) on Apr 28, 2004 at 12:08 UTC
    PPM is the package manager supplied with ActivePerl. In the last distribution that I installed (5.6 build 635), I had the choice of installing PPM2 or PPM3 with PPM3 the default choice. I have never found PPM3 to work properly. If you have the option of installing PPM2, you could try that but you have to completely uninstall PPM3 first. They do not work and play well together.

    You could try to download the modules directly from CPAN although, the installation process provided with these modules tends to assume you are using unix or linux so they do not always install well or easily.

    Good Luck PJ
Re: how to install ppm
by grantm (Parson) on Apr 28, 2004 at 19:02 UTC

    PPM comes with ActivePerl so if you have ActivePerl then you shouldn't need to install it. PPM has always worked for me 'out of the box' except where I was behind a proxy - their PPM FAQ covers that.