[PLUG] perl and CPAN (was Re: Upcoming December talk)

[Malcolm <mjhlists-plug-20080906@liminalflux.net>]

On 9/19/2012 2:52 PM, Morgan Jones wrote:

only a month late, but...

> This may not be a whole night's topic but it's always bugged me and
> I'm curious if I'm alone:
>
> I would be interested to hear how you use perl modules as a
> programmer.  I do a fair amount of Perl programming and use my
> scripts at different customer sites.  There is nothing I find more
> frustrating than a script with a dozen dependencies which themselves
> have several dependencies.  I'll admit it's been a while since I used
> the CPAN module but it was only of moderate help the last time I used
> it.
>
> Ultimately what I do is try to meet my needs without modules and
> limit my use to necessities.

> Is there a trick I'm missing or are modules just difficult and that's
> the way it is?

Modules should not be difficult. The whole point of CPAN is to make your 
life easier by not requiring you to reimplement the wheel.

There's a couple of modules that make it much easier to deal with:

 http://search.cpan.org/dist/App-cpanminus/lib/App/cpanminus.pm
 cpanm (cpan-minus), which generally "just does the right thing" when 
installing modules without prompting you unless it absolutely has to.

 http://search.cpan.org/~apeiron/local-lib/
 local:lib, which lets you install to and run using a local install of 
any modules. it also has a "core-only" option so that you know you have 
everything you might be dependent on in your local-lib.

Between them it makes it pretty easy to install and deploy what you 
need. Once I have my local-lib set up for a project, I can just copy the 
folder along with whatever script(s) I need and it Just Works(tm).

I generally don't get to the meets (being in the northern suburbs puts 
me a long way from both Center City and the PLUG "North" meetings), but 
I'd be happy to write up a walk through or discuss on or off list if 
there's an interest.
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