[rt-users] Perl dependency hell?

[Ben Goodwin]

I thought I'd post this for the benefit of others.  I was hesitant to go
with RT even though I liked the features and interface .. but I did, and I'm
glad..  I'm coming to understand how to modify things, and how easy it is.
The modular design of the code is great and allows quick and easy changes.
That said, one of the things I *hate* to do on my RedHat servers is install
software outside of an RPM - IE perl modules.. even if via CPAN.  I found a
program, cpan2rpm, that saved my life.  It allows you to create an RPM
directly from CPAN modules such as:

cpan2rpm Log::Dispatch

and poof, you've got a perl-Log-Dispatch-2.01-1.i386.rpm

Now, since some of the listed perl modules have dependencies on others, I'll
list all the perl RPMs my system has so you don't have to figure it out
yourself (RedHat 7.3/MySQL/RT2-0-15):

perl-DB_File-1.75-34.99.6
perl-DBD-MySQL-1.2219-6
perl-HTML-Tagset-3.03-14
perl-libnet-1.0901-17
perl-Storable-1.0.14-15
perl-libwww-perl-5.63-9
perl-Test-Simple-0.48_01-1
perl-Devel-StackTrace-1.03-1
perl-DBIx-DataSource-0.02-1
perl-FreezeThaw-0.43-1
perl-Text-Template-1.43-1
perl-Tie-IxHash-1.21-1
perl-MailTools-1.58-1
perl-MIME-Base64-2.12-14
perl-TimeDate-1.10-14
perl-IO-stringy-2.108-1
perl-CGI.pm-2.91-1
perl-Exception-Class-1.10-1
perl-Scalar-List-Utils-1.10-1
perl-Apache-Session-1.54-1
perl-FCGI-0.67-1
perl-5.6.1-34.99.6
perl-DBI-1.21-1
perl-Digest-MD5-2.20-1
perl-HTML-Parser-3.26-2
perl-NDBM_File-1.75-34.99.6
perl-URI-1.17-16
perl-CPAN-1.65-1
perl-Class-ReturnValue-0.51-1
perl-DBIx-SearchBuilder-0.79-1
perl-MLDBM-2.01-1
perl-Params-Validate-0.51-1
perl-Log-Dispatch-2.01-1
perl-Text-Wrapper-1.000-1
perl-MIME-tools-5.411-1
perl-Class-Data-Inheritable-0.02-1
perl-Class-Container-0.09-1
perl-HTML-Mason-1.18-1
perl-suidperl-5.6.1-34.99.6

This list includes a few RPMs available in the RH7.3 distribution.

One other thing I hated was having to statically compile in mod_perl, so I'm
using FastCGI in DSO mode and all works perfectly.

cpan2rpm is at http://perl.arix.com/cpan2rpm/

    -=| Ben