Perl CPAN vs. RPM?

[Michael A. Peters]

On 01/25/2005 12:51:25 PM, 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?

rpm for sure.

cpan will sometimes want to upgrade stuff - and you really want rpm to  
upgrade stuff, not cpan - because your updater (yum/up2date/whatever)  
will want to update via rpm.

So you install via cpan, it upgrades something, then yum does an update  
that downdates what cpan did because it doesn't know what cpan did, and  
you end up with broken stuff.

Also - if you install stuff by rpm that depends upon a particular perl  
module that cpan installed and not rpm, rpm won't know about it - and  
you have --nodeps install, which then causes issues when you want to  
update that via yum or whatever.

If you can't find an rpm for a perl module, they are pretty easy to  
make yourself - somewhere I have a generic spec file that I just modify  
for whatever perl modules I need and it usually works.

But rpm is definitely the way to go on a system that is managed by rpm.