Re: CPAN & Module gripes (was Re: Ever Wonder...?)

Dan Kegel (dank@alumni.caltech.edu)
Sun, 11 Apr 1999 01:43:21 +0000 

In article http://www.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=351186300
Clinton A. Pierce  <cpierce1@ford.com> wrote:
> A LOT of very clueful people get lost in CPAN the 
> first few times, when installing non-trivial modules manually.  ...
> New people RTFM or are told to use CPAN by c.l.p.m.  New people try to 
> use CPAN, and if CPAN.pm doesn't work right (100%) there's NO reasonable
> fallback mechanism.

I guess I can confirm this :-(

I'm trying to install Apache and mod_perl.  Everything went
fine until 'make test' in mod_perl.  At that point, I descended
into CPAN hell.
Currently, I'm stuck because I can't install LWP.  Doing
  install Bundle::LWP
yields the error
  Can't locate URI/URL.pm in @INC
  ...
  Bundle summary: The following items seem to have had installation
problems:
  URI LWP 

and I can't for the life of me find URI.  find / -name URL.pm doesn't
find it.  CPAN is no help.
  m /URI/   
shows (among others)
Module          Apache::URI     (DOUGM/mod_perl-1.19.tar.gz)
Module          URI             (N/A)
Module          URI::Escape     (Contact Author The libwww-perl mailing
list <libwww-perl@ics.uci.edu>)
Module          URI::URL        (Contact Author The libwww-perl mailing
list <libwww-perl@ics.uci.edu>)
  install URI
doesn't work, nor does
  install Module::URI
  install Bundle::URI
  install URI::URL
  install Apache::URI
(the latter of course turned out to be another way to install mod_perl
 and demonstrate the lack of LWP).

I did learn a few things that might actually be true, but I'm not sure:

1. If CPAN hurts itself, do 'rm -rf /root/.cpan' to start over
2. If you have trouble fetching a file during a CPAN install,
   the CPAN archives you picked may be out of date.
   This happened to me; several CPAN sites only had the .6 version
   of something that CPAN kept trying to download the .7 version of.
   Do a web search for the filename in question to find a CPAN
   mirror that has the file in question, and add it to the
   urllist with 'o conf urllist shift ftp://new.site.foo'

Questions unanswered:
1. Where to find URI
2. How to change the urllist permanently.  rm -rf /root/.cpan
   doesn't wipe out the old values, even...

Whimper... maybe I should just go download an RPM with this stuff
already compiled.  RPM, come to think of it, is a culture just
like CPAN.  The CPAN community might look at how RPM's are indexed
and dependency-checked to see if they're missing any good ideas.
- Dan