On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, Mário Gamito yowled: > Hi, > >> That may be a good reason to use the "ask" option to >> following dependencies, especially if using an older version >> of Perl. If it wanted a newer version of some module that's >> bundled with Perl, then it will happily upgrade Perl for you. >> I have to say I prefer to do that one manually. > I secon that. > CPAN is a real shit. Only good for small modules with no dependencies.
This is definitely not the case for me: I keep several hundred modules up to date with it. It copes with shifting dependencies and everything. Older versions of CPAN were a bit iffy and tended to try to do things like download new versions of Perl and install them, which is rarely what you'd want, but v1.64 fixed that and all versions since then have been just peachy. What *is* a kludge is the way it sucks version numbers out of packages by regexery on the source code: sometimes it gets it wrong and decides you have... odd versions of packages. Also, sometimes when a package drops some part of itself, the author forgets to remove it from CPAN, so you can then accidentally reinstall it (whereupon it'll probably break). But both of those problems are arguably the package author's fault. > I've already tried ti install SpamAssassin from CPAN several times in > differnt Unixes and always fails somewhere along the process. What're the failures? I don't install SA itself from CPAN, but all of its prereqs were already installed by chasing various module dependency chains, and to my best recollection none failed. -- `The copyright file is for everyone. That we make it available in plain-text, uncompressed form rather than in spinning, throbbing OpenGL-rendered 3D text over a thumping dance music soundtrack is a feature, not a bug.' --- Branden Robinson
