[Melbourne-pm] CPAN module

Scott Penrose scottp at dd.com.au
Wed Mar 15 01:13:17 PST 2006


On 15/03/2006, at 19:20, Mathew Robertson wrote:

>
>> Just thought of yet another better way of explainig it.
>>
>> In Debian - which is a package management system like CPAN, your  
>> package depends on another package, maybe with a minimum version  
>> number, but as a package name.
>>
>> You can write your own packages, download them manually, and  
>> manually install them - but there is no way for the package  
>> management system to do that - it is always going to install a  
>> package by its identifier - in this case name.
>>
>> To get around this a special release of a package will often be  
>> required - eg: with some special patches, maybe a newer version,  
>> maybe just because it had to be built differently (eg: with  
>> different threading model).
>>
>> In every case - it is given a new name.
>>
> No its not - Debian allows you to point your apt repository to  
> servers other than the Sid/Sarge/Horny-carrot mirrors -> you can  
> point it at your own local mirror, then inject your own package  
> with exactly same name/namespace as any existing package.
>
> Debian can do it. RPM can do it. I'm asking if CPAN can do it.

Yep CPAN (the MODULE !!!) can do it. CPAN (the Repository) can not.

As I said.

CPAN & Debian are virtually identical, as is all Package Management  
systems.

As you described above - it is not distributing it with CPAN, but  
making your own CPAN distribution and getting each person who wants  
to use your module to configure their local CPAN to use you.

Of course using the Perl Module CPAN to install is all about  
automatically downloading a whole set of modules from a central  
repository, not about the actual installation - which just does a tar  
xvzf; perl Makefile.PL; make; make test; make install - which of  
course you can do with any .tar.gz - so even better CPAN will happily  
play with any other way you want to install perl modules.

So I stand by what I originally said - CPAN - which everyone  
understands to be the repository CPAN, not the Perl Module that  
interfaces with it - can't do what you want.

See CPAN is the repository, where as Perl Modules are just Perl Modules.

Where as in Debian and RPM etc it is both the repository and the  
interface.

But the bottom line is - these names (CPAN, RPM, APT, ...) all have  
two meanings and can be quite confusing in conversation :-)

Scott
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