Hi,
The newest addition to what CPANPLUS can do for you has been extended two-fold.
First off, we've added plugin support to the default shell, allowing you to extend it in anyway you see fit. Examples of this include being able to show a code diff between 2 releases, or to query open tickets from rt.cpan.org
Adding your own plugins is quite trivial, and explained in the HOWTO.
The second addition is to provide a mirror with prebuilt packages for
debian. The idea is to build packages automatically, and package them as debs, so people can use their trusted
package managers when fetching CPAN modules. The full details on how this
works can be found here. Suffice to
say that this is a pilot, and if it works out, we intend adding similar mirrors for ports, PPM, RPM, etc.
Right now, we're just building the modules listed in the Phalanx Top 100, but once we have sorted out more reliable large scale automatic builds, the CPAN is the limit!.
Both these features are present in the development release of CPANPLUS and CPANPLUS::Dist::Deb which you are much encouraged to try out. As soon as any last kinks that may exist have been dealt with, this will be released large scale.
Furthermore, all dependencies are listed as libfoo-perl | cpan-libfoo-perl
Brilliant! So this does not obviate the need for more package maintainers to do a real packaging for Debian, but provides a means to track CPAN latest on our development systems.
I can't wait to get home and add this to my sources.list files.
