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
