[Pdx-pm] Package Management

[Andrew Clapp]

I have had some good and bad experiences with this and I'm wondering
if there's a better way.  I first ran into this when writing code for
some company way back when that just grew and grew and had millions of
dependencies.  Then later while supporting RT (Request Tracker
http://bestpractical.com/rt/), I had to deal with it again.  They
provide an install script that "fixes" your deps, and sometimes it
worked, sometimes it didn't and it seems it was affected mostly by
which OS and version of OS was being installed upon, and how much
other perl hackery had happened there before.  For small to medium
environments, or instances where there are large lists of dependencies
supporting a central thing like imaging software (libjpeg, libpng,
libgif, zlib, etc) I find that using on of the cpan(+/-) tools works
well.  But when you get to a larger system that is under constant
changing demands, there are still problems that creep up that are less
than fun.

Can anyone point me towards a good discussion or good articles on
various solutions to the conflicts that can arise from using both cpan
(including plus and minus) options and linux (rpm, yum, apt) or bsd
options (ports, pkgsrc)?  When you wear both hats as a sysadmin and
developer, it creates obvious conflicts and there must be a good
solution.

-ASC

-- 

Andrew S. Clapp
Aeonic Enterprises