[Melbourne-pm] CPAN module

Ben Marsh blm at woodheap.org
Wed Mar 15 01:33:51 PST 2006


* Mathew Robertson (mathew.robertson at netratings.com.au) 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.
> >>
> >>Scott
> >>    
> >
> >Unless you organise your own repository. In which case, anyone that
> >wants to use it must configure their system to use your repository. (And
> >some other stuff about version numbers and pinning)
> >
> >I guess the CPAN parallel is that you have to run your own CPAN if you
> >wish to keep the same name.
> >  
> Thank-you Geoff,  this is exactly what I was looking for.
> 
> You wouldn't happen to know how to setup a local CPAN mirror?
> Note that I only need to inject some specific packages, so it would be 
> nice to not have to sync every other package which is available from a 
> normal CPAN mirror.
> 

How much of a mirror are you talking?  I have my own MINICPAN mirror set
up at home that I point my CPAN.pm configurations to.  It is not a full
mirror of CPAN. Just the most recent versions of modules (AFAICT)

I presume you could add packages to it provided you also update 

$CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
$CPAN/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz
$CPAN/modules/03modlist.data.gz

01mailrc.txt.gz contains authors

modules go in directories like

$CPAN/authors/A/AB/ABCDE

if your alias in 01mailrc.txt.gz is ABCDE

Creation of MINICPAN is done with Randall Schwartz's minicpan.pl
published in one of his columns 

http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/LinuxMag/col42.html

There is also a CPAN script and module that does similar 

http://search.cpan.org/~rjbs/CPAN-Mini-0.40/bin/minicpan

How this info helps,

Ben Marsh


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