I experienced a problem yesterday which recalls the 'cpan' usage problem
described in this group on Sept 11 by Shawn H Corey
(http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.module-authors/2009/09/msg7854.html).
Yesterday I was using the 'cpan' shell for the first time in a couple
of months on my laptop. The laptop is Mac OS X 10.4.11/PPC.
Since at least November 2006 I have governed my CPAN configurations by
changing values in ~/.cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm. (I can testify to that
date because during that month's Chicago Perl Hackathon, Michael
Schwern++ made some adjustments to that MyConfig.pm that greatly
improved my 'cpan' shell usage experience!)
However, when I was using the 'cpan' shell yesterday, I found that it
was no longer honoring configuration settings in
~/.cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm. Instead, it was reverting to settings found
in the "vendor perl" location established when I got this iBook way back
in May 2004: ~/Library/Application\ Support/.cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm. I
knew that something was wrong when I started to see 'cpan' try to
download files from mirrors listed in the 'vendor Perl' MyConfig.pm that
have long since ceased to function. Based on those settings, 'cpan'
tried to 'make' modules with '/usr/local/bin/make' -- but I don't have
and 'make' in /usr/local/bin!
Consulting the POD for CPAN.pm, I tried to run the 'mkmyconfig' program
in the 'cpan' shell. (This was the first I had heard of 'mkmyconfig'.)
But it stored that configuration in the 'vendor perl' location -- not
in ~/.cpan/CPAN/.
I was reduced to diff-ing the two versions of MyConfig.pm, then manually
updating that in the 'vendor perl' location with my 'urllist' and other
settings from the other location. But I really don't want to do this,
because I never want to poke into ~/Library files. (I never want to
edit a file with a wordspace in its path!)
I have always resisted the temptation to directly update CPAN.pm. I
have no record of such an update in ~/.cpan/build/. However, I *did*
update to Perl 5.10.1 by building it from source on the day it debuted
last month. I suspect that an updated version of CPAN.pm came in
therewith, as I'm now at $CPAN::VERSION = '1.9402';.
Can anyone diagnose this problem and tell me how I can once again govern
my 'cpan' shell configuration from ~/.cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm?
Thank you very much.
Jim Keenan
