Re: CPAN & Module gripes (was Re: Ever Wonder...?)
Dan Kegel (dank@alumni.caltech.edu)
Sun, 11 Apr 1999 04:04:43 +0000
[Summary:
Problem solved. Thanks. CPAN needs some polish, but there's
nothing like a helping hand.]
Otis Gospodnetic wrote:
> > and I can't for the life of me find URI.
> i /URI/ yields, among other things:
> Module URI (GAAS/URI-1.02.tar.gz)
> ...
>
> > 2. How to change the urllist permanently. ...
> I believe there is CPAN/Config.pm file where this may be stored....
Yes! Editing /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.00503/CPAN/Config.pm
to point to a good CPAN archive instead of the bogus ones
CPAN gave me when I installed it, and then doing 'reload index',
fixed it so I could find and download URI.
(Oddly, though, I saw two matches for URI: the one you expected,
and another one,
Module uri (L/LD/LDACHARY/URIC-2.02.tar.gz)
Fortunately, that one didn't get loaded.)
Suggestion: the script that shows the first-time CPAN user
the list of CPAN mirror sites should optionally check the mirror sites
to make sure they don't suck somehow.
> > 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.
>
> maybe - don't know enough about RPMs although I know that I cannot download
> an RPM from a web server (http://..... .rpm) but only an FTP one (ftp:// ...
> .rpm) and most RPMs seem to be distributed via the former. I never
> understood that.
Too true. .rpm (the suffix) has been taken by some streaming audio
format, I think. Web sites that serve them should set up their
MIME type table differently. Messy.
Thanks,
Dan