Software Install Best Practice?

[Miskell, Craig]

> On Wed, Nov 16, 2005 at 03:03:54PM -0500, Carl Reynolds wrote:
> [...]
> > By the way, just out of curiosity, why are you using rpm to 
> maintain 
> > your system rather than up2date, yum, or smart?
> 
> I have not begun to maintain this system.  I am referencing 
> the part in
> the supplied documentation that advises me to use RPM, but that
> documentation doesn't strike me as too useful.
> 
> Yes, I know about CPAN.  It is a handy last resport.  I'm 
> looking for a
> great source of pre-packaged software that may or may not be Perl
> modules, akin to BSD ports collections or LIVNA ... so I'm asking here
> "how do you guys install stuff on Red Hat."
> 
> I'd prefer NOT to use CPAN if I can avoid it, because the fewer
> packaging systems that are used to maintain a system, the less likely
> you are to screw yourself up with conflicts, right?
> 
> So ... please, where do clever SysAdmins go to maintain basic
> not-supplied-by-RedHat packages on RHEL	? :)
For perl stuff, I've just recently started to use, and am very much
liking, cpan2rpm.  This will build an RPM out of a CPAN module - IMHO,
it gives the best of both worlds, in that you get all the advantages of
software available by CPAN, with the whole CPAN build system etc, but
RPM can take care of dependencies and file management at a system level.
It also means rpm -e is a *really* easy and clean way to uninstall a
CPAN package later (something I don't think CPAN has any built-in way of
doing - I'm open to evidence to the contrary).  It means you only have
the one packaging system (as you say), to avoid conflicts etc.

Available at http://perl.arix.com/cpan2rpm/

Craig Miskell
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