[Catalyst] Managing CPAN on Ubuntu [was: 'Installing under ...' on the wiki]

[Thomas Hartman]

Just to plug (pimp?) (ubuntu installer) pimpmycat again:

"Basically, this is a collection of simple shell scripts. The main
function is to install a collection of external dependencies organized
around perl under a single top level directory. Along with this, there
are user friendly backup and revert helper scripts to snapshot all
external dependencies at any particular point in time. Snapshot backups
are taken during the install at various crucial points. So, for
example, you don't have
to sit through the half-hour perl compile process more than once. The next
time you want to verify if something installs cleanly against a particular
configuration, you can snapshot-revert to it in just a few seconds.

Developers are encouraged to modify the install script to fold in the
particular
dependency idiosynchracies that their individual projects may have.

The motivating idea is that ideally a catalyst web project (or
actually any project) should be re-installable at will on a virgin
system without any babysitting.  However, various rough edges in the
perl ecosystem make this impracticable.  Compiling and installing
takes a long time, and many important CPAN modules are "evil" in the
sense that they ask for user input, even if only to cocnfirm some
default. Pimpmycat tries to minimize this evil.

Also, I believe that these constraints tempt module authors to release
modules which, for example, pass all tests only when some particular
dependency is there that they have forgotten about. By providing an easy
way for module authors to snapshot-revert all the way back to a fresh perl,
more thorough testing is encouraged."

http://pimpmycat.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/install

Interesting? Misguided? Killfile?

best, thomas.

2007/1/8, Julien GILLES <jgilles at glmultimedia.com>:
>
>
>
> Jonathan Rockway a écrit :
>  > On Friday 05 January 2007 05:08, Richard Jolly wrote:
>  >> Reviving an old thread here - I was wondering if you found such a
>  >> Dummies list.
>  >>
>  >> I'm new to the debian/ubuntu way (I've been on FreeBSD, an OS X). I
>  >> gather there is a danger of mixing apt-get and CPAN installs. But from
>  >> my impression people usually end up with mixed installs anyway.
>  >> dh-make-perl is an option, but doesn't handle dependencies as well as
>  >> cpan.
>  >>
>  >> I'm looking for strategies to handle this - particularly in the context
>  >> of installing catalyst on ubuntu.
>  >
>  > I like using CPANPLUS and CPANPLUS::Dist::Deb.  If you use this module,
>  > cpanplus will build a debian package (and dependencies) and then use dpkg
> to
>  > install the module.  That means that you can easily remove and upgrade
>  > packages with dpkg (and apt), or just use CPAN.  It's kind of a pain if
>  > you've already installed some modules, though, so it's best if you start
>  > using it right away.  (The problem, though, is that you have to install
>  > CPANPLUS somehow.)
>  >
>
>  Same choice here. And with reprepro it easy to manage a custom repository
> for
>  deb that allows easy apt-get install/remove on production servers.
>
>  --
>  Julien Gilles.
>
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