On Thu, 5 Aug 1999, Christoph Badura wrote:

> And how do you back out broken modules with the cpan module?
> Only two weeks ago I've wasted way to many hours just to find out that
> the latest CGI.pm was seriously broken and discovered that no fix would
> be available in a reasonable time frame.

You're describing the present state of things if you were to just
invoke 'perl -M CPAN -e shell' and start installing. Even so, it's
tempting, and I've done it. It would be nicer if CPAN had some measure
of integration. The key hack will be to make it keep track of what it
installs, so the files can be tracked in the package database. That's
one thing it doesn't do now--when it looks up the currently installed
versions, it's parsing the actual modules. No database.

> > Frederick Bruckman <fb@enteract.com> writes: 
> > All the p5-* packages will then reduce to one line "cpan"
> > invokations, and modules for which no p5-* directory exists will
> > get an entry in the database, as if one did.
> 
> I don't see how you can do that with many of the modules I've added during
> the last months.

You're supposed to be able to do something like
 "perl -MCPAN -e 'CPAN::Shell->install DBD/DBI-1.08.tar.gz'"
to get that exact version.

> Last I looked it didn't handle local patches at all.  But that's been a
> while.  We need to maintain local patches.

That's a valid point. Even if CPAN could handle local patches, where
else would you store them but pkgsrc? A number of modules do build out
of the box though. Moreover, there are more modules than anyone is
ever going to make packages for.

> Personally, I loath the cpan module.  It's tendency to install the latest
> untested versions might be nice for newcomers, but I prefer tested and
> working packages over the latest bleeding edge version.

Some people are funny that way...

OK. So the idea that all the p5-* modules will be immediately obsolete
is a little too ambitious. Given that CPAN installs by default, and
beckons the fearless, I would be happy just to make it track the files
it installs and register them in the package database. Users should
probably be warned to prefer existing p5-* packages.

> And how do you back out broken modules with the cpan module?

The idea is to use "pkg_delete". That's the whole point.