[rt-users] Installation on Cobalt RaQ XTR

[Bob Apthorpe]

On Wednesday 22 May 2002 22:20, Andrew Yager wrote:

> As far as the Cpan debate - I'm using 1.5.something and I still have it
> want to upgrade me to version 5.6.1 of perl... Which is fine except it's a
> real no-no on a cobalt, and I can't seem to get a Makefile for perl on OS X
> (nothing ever appears after the configure script runs, and it seems as
> though it should work for me...)

Hmm. I thought 1.58 or 1.59 was safe (maybe as far back as 1.52); I know 1.48 
was unsafe. The trick is manually installing all the modules that have been 
folded into the current core perl distribution that were not distributed with 
your version of perl before upgrading CPAN and setting it to ask (not follow) 
prerequisites. The problem is that it's not a simple matter to tell what's 
new in core perl since your perl was installed so it's not safe to use 
older versions of CPAN because you never know which modules will trigger 
CPAN's "differently-helpful" behavior.

My old notes on configuring perl at Excite are at 
http://www.cynistar.net/~apthorpe/xcit/doclets/configuring_cpan.html. Some of 
the notes are site-specific (directories, local CPAN mirror, nasty comments 
about ncftp, etc.) Note that CPAN's original behavior does make a bit of 
sense, just not in an environment with a shred of configuration management. 
There are some really cool things you can do with CPAN::Site, a private 
repository, and a local mirror of the public repository but that discussion 
is way, way off-topic.

Can't help with OS/X though...

-- Bob