Perl CPAN vs. RPM?

Thomas Cameron thomas.cameron at camerontech.com
Tue Jan 25 21:00:05 UTC 2005


On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 21:51 +0100, cjlesh wrote:
> Hey all:
> 
> I'm taking the first steps in learning perl, and had a question about CPAN.
> 
> I see that some packagers (DAG, fedora pre-extras, etc...) have RPMs of things I could also install from the commandline with CPAN.
> 
> Which is the "better" way? 
> 
> -cjl

Asking what the "best" way is is a great way to start a flame war.  :-)

In my world, I hate to mix packaged (i.e. RPMs) software and software
installed from source or CPAN.  If you install from CPAN the package
management system has no way to know that the perl module (or whatever)
is installed.  

RPMs check to see that the package containing prerequisite software is
installed.  So let's say you have package bar.rpm which requires the
software supplied by the foo software suite.  You grab foo off the 'Net,
compile it and install it, and then try to install bar.rpm.  It will
fail, because all it knows to check is the RPM database.  According to
that database, foo is not installed (remember you installed from source,
not a package).  Even though the foo suite is on the hard drive, bar.rpm
won't install.

IMHO, mixing packaged software and software installed from source or
CPAN is a bad idea.

Also, you should really look at cpan2rpm available at
http://perl.arix.com/cpan2rpm/. It is an AWESOME tool for creating
packages for CPAN software.

Thomas




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