All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

debian perl wtf

TeeJay on 2006-12-14T15:02:12

The hate I feel for debian perl packagers is making me want to smash things :

http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/perl-policy/ch-perl.html#s-paths

wtf?

Yeah - let's split perl libs all over the shop.

For some reason, all these different directorys are ensuring that each time I try and install some pure perl modules from source, they are installed in a different fucking place, often an entirely new and pointless one like /usr/local/share/share/perl

arrgh!

Try upgrading perl...

tsee on 2006-12-14T15:58:27

I hear you!

Think about what happens when the perl version is increased by a minor version (i.e. 5.8.7 -> 5.8.8).

Steffen

They did it to Ruby, too

djberg96 on 2006-12-14T19:32:56

This caused quite the shit storm with the Ruby community as well. Having to deal with, "Why does my require fail" on IRC almost every day is reason enough to have the Debian package managers beaten with a rubber hose.

As far as I can tell Debian is run by a bunch of twenty-somethings who think they're experts on package management, and they're going to save us 5 MB of disk space, whether we want them to or not. I know I'll never use a Debian flavored distro.

Debian's Package Management

ajt on 2006-12-14T21:22:14

Debian's package management system is a thing of beauty. It works far better than anything else I've had to use (e.g. Red Hat). However for packages that you work directly with that have many components - like Perl, things can sometimes go a little odd. You must either use only packaged components or install your own version in /usr/local and managed that manually (e.g. with CPAN). Mixing CPAN and the distro packaged version of Perl isn't always safe...

Always install your own perl

clscott on 2006-12-14T21:39:12

I'll let this link explain it since my two cents have already been laid out:

http://use.perl.org/user/jdavidb/journal/31851

Re:Always install your own perl

ajt on 2006-12-15T09:54:54

Sensible advice.

I actually like it

naterajj on 2006-12-15T01:26:40

I think it's pretty simple:

modules provided by debian go in /usr manually installed modules go in /usr/local

This works great if you stick to a stable release since the perl version won't be changing. Obviously it's not as convenient if you are using something other than stable.

Of course, you're going to be stuck with the debian provided versions, and they have long release cycles, but IMHO I think that's a small price to pay compared to performing system/security updates.