On Jun 7, 2004, at 1:26 AM, Timothy Bailey wrote:
OK, technically, I did find this page:
http://www.cpan.org/modules/INSTALL.html
I unfortunately had to decide to ignore this, since the whole "make" sequence was =not= working for me
The best thing to do in that case would have been to figure out *why* it wasn't working. Installing Perl modules is not a simple, type-what-you're-told exercise. You need to understand what you're typing and why you're typing it.
The main reason I didn't check perlmodinstall is I didn't think of it; I would have thought that CPAN.org would give that information. In any case, now that I look at it, I see that perlmodinstall is subtitled "Perl modules: how to install from CPAN", which is of course not relevant, since I'm not using CPAN to install something
CPAN refers to the archive (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network), the main archive site (cpan.org), and to the module (CPAN.pm) that can be used to automate the process of downloading and installing modules from the archive.
The 'perlmodinstall' document describes how to install CPAN modules manually. The CPAN.pm module basically executes a bunch of system() calls to run the commands found in 'perlmodinstall'. Understanding that is key - regardless of whether you enter the commands one at a time or via CPAN.pm shell, the end result is the same.
, I'm doing it manually. Of course, it doesn't seem to actually give information about installing CPAN modules specifically (that is, using the CPAN module). Since it gives information about installing generic modules (like the second URL above), it ironically turns out to be relevant.
Not ironic at all, just confusing names. A "CPAN module" is simply a module that's found on cpan.org or one of the many CPAN mirror sites. It can be fetched and installed manually, as described in 'perlmodinstall', or with the help of the CPAN.pm module.
Why is /System/Library/Perl not the right place for CPAN 1.76? It apparently is the right place for CPAN 1.52.
/System/Library/Perl is for "Core" modules that are included with Perl, which the older CPAN.pm module was. User-installed modules, whether they're from CPAN or somewhere else, go in /Library/Perl.
Did Apple put it in the wrong place? (Yes, I'm technically a user installing 1.76, but Apple isn't the purveyor of Perl either. They're sort of a user as well.) I would still need to get the old version out of there, right?
/Library/Perl appears before /System/Library/Perl in @INC, so user-installed modules take precedence over core modules. If having two versions of the module bothers you, you can use the UNINST option to delete the old version:
sudo make install UNINST=1
sherm--
