[linux-elitists] apropos of nothing

[Modus Operandi]

Hey all,

    At risk of reinforcing your impression of me as a perennially
    confused elitist-wannabee (well-warranted, although my non-technical
    friends seem to think I'm some kind of whiz) I'd like to ask about
    something that's been unclear to me lately: the mysterious
    relationship between the CPAN versions of Perl modules and the
    $DEBIAN_FLAVOR packages which also provide Perl module support.

    To wit: a recent Mailman upgrade dragged our Perl version along with
    it, breaking all the Perl modules associated with the earlier
    version. I used CPAN to replace the simple ones like Date::Calc
    which we needed for our Blosxom blogs. But just today, I received an
    urgent email from a remote shell user who asked me to restore
    "libhtml-parser-perl" (which his SpamAssassin version requires.)

    I used CPAN to install HTML::Parser -- and I also used apt-get to
    install libhtml-parser-perl -- so was this redundant?

    This is the second time I've been baffled by this discrepancy. Using
    CPAN to complile Image::Magick proved to be unexpectedly difficult,
    so I used apt-get to install perlmagick, which seemed to work. Yet
    perl -MCPAN -e 'install Image::Magick' still shows the same errors.

    Intuitively, I suppose that apt-get is installing a working binary,
    while CPAN is trying to build the Perl module from sources (and
    sometimes hanging up on some dependencies along the way.) But it
    would be nice to know for sure, instead of just guessing.

    That's why I'm glad I'm on this list, with a bunch of people who are
    smarter than me.

-- 
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Tue Aug 2 20:12:02 EDT 2005
The Moon is Waning Crescent (4% of Full)