[Catalyst] PPM vs CPAN

[Matt S Trout]

Hugh Lampert wrote:
> Nilson Santos Figueiredo Junior wrote:
>> On 6/26/06, Hugh Lampert <hlampert at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>> Just to let you know something amusing - I tried the "preconfigured"
>>> CPAN.pm that comes with ActiveState Perl 5.8.8.  First, it took about 10
>>> minutes to figure out I needed to type "Enter+Space" instead of just
>>> Enter to get my commands accepted.  Then, upon trying the "i" command, I
>>> was informed there was a newer CPAN bundle available and that it was
>>> suggested I upgrade in place.  After typing install Bundle::CPAN the
>>> most amazing chain of downloads, dialogs, makes, compiles, test outputs,
>>> etc. was initiated.... I was truly in fear for my life that something
>>> was going to get severely screwed up when it started downloading and
>>> compiling Crypt and PGP modules.  In the end, after the upgrade I was
>>> forced to go through the CPAN configuration dialog anyway.  Everything
>>> seems to have been successfully installed however and nothing seems to
>>> be amiss.  I DO think for my own sanity that I will stick with PPM's
>>> where available, as THAT process seems to be mostly just download and
>>> copy to the appropriate location.
>> This is rather weird. You shouldn't need to type "Enter+Space". In
>> fact, I'm not even sure if I understood you correctly. The CPAN shell
>> is a regular command shell. You type your commands and press Enter as
>> in any other shell.
>>
> It IS weird - but on my Windows XP workstation the CPAN shell command 
> interpreter does not accept commands when I hit Enter unless the Enter 
> key is followed by a space.  I have no idea what kind of parser is 
> involved.  It's not really important though because it DOES work.  It's 
> kind of like the Perl debugger not being restartable in ActiveState Perl 
> (it gives some kind of POSIX constant not defined error)... it's 
> annoying to a minor extent but still workable.
>> You didn't really need to upgrade the CPAN shell but when you do it
>> when it asks you if you're "ready for manual configuration" all you
>> need to do is type "no" and it will auto-configure itself. Now, I know
>> *this* is rather counter-intuitive. But the rest seems pretty
>> intuitive to me.
>>
> Coming from the Windows world, I am severely suspicious of allowing 
> ANYTHING to configure itself.  I worked through the dialog, it really 
> wasn't a problem, just not what I wanted to do with my boss breathing 
> down my neck regarding my choice of Catalyst as an application platform.

Once you've got CPAN configured and nmake and a gcc installed,

http://shadowcatsystems.co.uk/static/cat-install

will install Catalyst itself plus deps hands-off via CPAN (with a little help 
from ppm on windows)

> BTW, Why is it Task::Catalyst and not Bundle::Catalyst? I want to 
> install this but it does not run, getting an NMAKE fatal error U1077, 
> errors looking for GPG, etc.  This is why I like the PPM packages... I'm 
> assuming that anything that fails to make does not get installed in the 
> perl lib tree, correct?

See http://search.cpan.org/~adamk/Task-1.01/lib/Task.pm for an explanation.

-- 
      Matt S Trout       Offering custom development, consultancy and support
   Technical Director    contracts for Catalyst, DBIx::Class and BAST. Contact
Shadowcat Systems Ltd.  mst (at) shadowcatsystems.co.uk for more information

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