SPUG: stand-alone mini-CPAN on a read-only CD

[Michael R. Wolf]

For a few years, I have had a complete, stand-alone mini CPAN on my laptop.
Thanks to Randal Schwartz for the original article that prompted me to set
it up!

    http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/LinuxMag/col42.html
    http://search.cpan.org/search?query=minicpan&mode=all

I've got a one-liner that helps me remember the options:

   minicpan -r http://www.perl.com/CPAN/ -l /CPAN-mini

/CPAN-mini currently consumes 673M.

It's great for times when I'm *not* connected to the internet.  (Oh the
horrors of a road-warrior, Perl evangelist...)

I'd like to make self-contained CD's that I can hand out in class, or even
use in class without relying on internet connectivity.

To my thinking, this would require running the cpan command (just perl
-MCPAN -eshell) and specifying the config parameters without having to rely
running config and writing back to the perl5/5.8/CPAN/Config.pm file (or
~/.cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm).

Has anyone pulled apart the hairball that is CPAN.pm and CPAN/Config.pm
enough to write a self-contained, CD-only, read-only version of the cpan
shell?

Extra points if it can figure out the root of the CD and add it to the
urllist config parameter as something like file:///CPAN-mini.

Extra points if that code is smart enough to work on linux and also on
Windows.


-- 
Michael R. Wolf
    All mammals learn by playing!
        MichaelRWolf at att.net