Hey folks, I've asked this recently on the CentOS list and got pointed at a few options, then went looking around and found you guys and figured I'd ask here. I found a thread in the archives about it, from about a year ago.
The basic problem is this : how to keep numerous machines with the same CPAN installation? i.e. same modules installed across all boxes. Seems like a simple thing to ask for, but something that CPAN just is not designed to do very well from what I can find. I've tried autobundle, and then applying the bundle, but you end up going through 10s of minutes of the whole build process answering questions and so forth, as there does not seem to be a way to tell CPAN to just use all the defaults. Someoen on the CentOS list pointed me at this article http://www.developertutorials.com/tutorials/cgi-perl/automate-perl-module-deployment-050426/page1.html which looked good at first, but ends up being a little too simplistic. I like the idea that you do it in several phases and break down the build process into its steps - do the "perl Makefile.PL" once, where you answer all the questions - then on each host go through and do the "make", "make install" and so forth. But this does not explain how I am supposed to deal with modules that want to install other modules and so forth, and I'm not savvy enough to figure it out myself. I see from your archives someone talking about http://perl.arix.com/cpan2rpm/ which appears to have promise as well. I guess I'll start playing with it to see where I get. I'm wondering how it deals with modules that require other modules. My other option is of course to go through my list of CPAN modules (about 170) and see if there are appropriate RPMs for them all at rpmforge or one of those places, and switch over to use those. From what I can see so far, yum/RPM is just a better way to do this as it was designed with this in mind. It is really easy to install what you need in an automated fashion without having to babysit the process for 10s of minutes. What are you all doing for this? thanks, -Alan -- “Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV” - Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food"
