[Catalyst] Re: Debian recommendation

[John Lee]

Paul Makepeace wrote:
> I recently have completely tossed using Debian's perl packages
> because, while I do love Debian and all its package awesomeness, there
> simply wasn't the package lib*-perl support in stable/lenny and even
> testing/squeeze didn't have all the goods needed for a (what I think
> is) fairly regular Catalyst install.

++ here.  I had to build a lot of missing modules, or upgrade modules,
that we wanted / needed.  I actually didn't mind the headaches of
chasing down dependencies when building my own packages using
dh-make-perl, because it made it so much simpler system-side to
distribute libraries (with dependencies!) with apt-get installs.

The roadblock came when the packaged perl libraries needed to be
upgraded in a manner inconsistent with the platform.  For example,
running perl 5.8.8 in an Ubuntu LTS installation, when you wanted
features found in perl 5.10.0.  When I started getting blocked on
upgrades due to conflicts with, say, perl-base and perl-modules, or
requirements for libperl5.10, I scrapped it and went with a source-built
perl and CPAN.  I even went through the process of creating updated
perl, perl-base, and perl-module packages based on 5.10, but eventually,
systems dependencies on the old version catch up to you.

> So my question then is: given you've presumably done this, which of
> your quoted solutions do you like best? I tried dh-make-perl many
> moons ago and gave up due to annoyances around following dependencies.
> Maybe CPP::Dist::Deb or something else solves that.

I didn't give CPP a try, but I had a lot of experience with
dh-make-perl.  I found that it gave you a good start, but you have to be
anal about creating packages for dependencies and setting descriptions.

> I'm hoping local::lib + cpan + git solves this but curious how
> Debian-integrated solutions work too.

I'd be curious to see if this works well for folks too!  I'm especially
interested in folks who do this with a perl installed to a separate
location, e.g. /usr/local/bin/perl.  I worry about things like C library
dependencies (ImageMagick comes to mind).


- John