[Intro: perl comes with a cpan module which gives access to a large suite of perl software, only a small fraction of which has been made available in debian package form. CPAN isn't very mature yet -- there's no deinstall mechanism for cpan stuff, and upgrading perl doesn't always work cleanly. However, it's sometimes very important that a machine have access to the full CPAN archive. Well, it turns out that some or all debian instances of cpan modules are being built with a non-default configuration. Which means that you can't build some other modules without configuring cpan appropriately. The problem is that this is not automatic, and the issue not specifically documented anywhere on a typical debian system.]
> > Actually, it seems like a documentation problem. Although > > INSTALLDIRS=perl is mentioned in the MakeMaker documentation, > > there's nothing documented anywhere else (for example, in > > /usr/doc/libdbi-perl/README.debian) that indicates that things > > are configured this way (nor why). Martin Schulze <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Where do you want to add this? To all perl CPAN modules' > documentation? Is that where the configuration decision is introduced? Or is introduced in perl or perl-base? > > In my opinion, all configuration choices which would normally > > be made by a sysadmin should be documented so that the sysadmin > > can know about them. Perhaps this point should be brought up > > on the policy list? > > Go ahead. [So: is there some policy that I've overlooked, which covers this case? If not, I think policy needs to be upgraded.] -- Raul
