APM: The proper way to use CPAN on a server

[Tim McDaniel]

On Fri, 9 Apr 2010, David Maynard <dmaynard at outserv.net> wrote:
> This usually isn't very popular with developers, but if it
> is a production server we don't use CPAN if we can avoid it.
> Instead we install RPM packages of the modules.  The main reason is
> that we want to have repeatable server builds.  It also helps you
> need the code to be portable to "stock" Hat systems. 
>
> For Red Hat/CentOS, the DAG (http://dag.wieers.com/) yum/RPM
> repository has a good selection of Perl packages.  There are a
> couple of other repositories that tend to have more bleeding-edge
> versions, but they haven't been around as long.

Can you expand on that, please?  I'm not familiar with Red Hat
systems, yum, RPM, and all that.  Given your requirement for
"repeatable server builds", I'm guessing that you somehow download
specific *.rpm files into a repository that's networked within your
site, and then on any particular server, mount or copy from the
repository and run command(s) to install using those files.

In my case, luckily this is a proof-of-concept installation of tools
that are unrelated to the server's purpose, so I have a lot of
freedom.

-- 
Tim McDaniel, tmcd at panix.com