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? > > -cjl Asking what the "best" way is is a great way to start a flame war. :-) In my world, I hate to mix packaged (i.e. RPMs) software and software installed from source or CPAN. If you install from CPAN the package management system has no way to know that the perl module (or whatever) is installed. RPMs check to see that the package containing prerequisite software is installed. So let's say you have package bar.rpm which requires the software supplied by the foo software suite. You grab foo off the 'Net, compile it and install it, and then try to install bar.rpm. It will fail, because all it knows to check is the RPM database. According to that database, foo is not installed (remember you installed from source, not a package). Even though the foo suite is on the hard drive, bar.rpm won't install. IMHO, mixing packaged software and software installed from source or CPAN is a bad idea. Also, you should really look at cpan2rpm available at http://perl.arix.com/cpan2rpm/. It is an AWESOME tool for creating packages for CPAN software. Thomas
