Perl CPAN vs. RPM?

Craig White craigwhite at azapple.com
Tue Jan 25 23:24:54 UTC 2005


On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 21:51 +0100, cjlesh wrote:
> Hey all:
> 
> I'm taking the first steps in learning perl, and had a question about CPAN.
> 
> I see that some packagers (DAG, fedora pre-extras, etc...) have RPMs of things I could also install from the commandline with CPAN.
> 
> Which is the "better" way? 
> 
----
when it comes to perl modules, I find that any way that works is the
better way. 

Philosophically, easier to type 
'yum install perl-DBD-mysql' 
than
perl -MCPAN -e shell
install DBD::mysql
exit

but I have found that sometimes neither work and I have to download the
perl module from search.cpan.org and untar it, perl Makefile.PL && make
&& make install to get it to install (did I mention cross my fingers).

I just ran this through whiteboxlinux mail list (title: I hate perl).

Another suggestion was:
If you like keeping things in RPM form as much as possible (say, to
replicate across 200 servers), cpan2rpm is your friend:

cpan2rpm DBD::mysql

or manually download the tarball and build:

cpan2rpm XML-Stream-1.17.tar.gz

The dependency building isn't perfect and may required manual
installation of additional packages, but in the end you'll have binary
RPMs you can add to your local repository and yum install everywhere.

When you go to war...you use whatever weapon that is in your arsenal
that works.

Craig




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