[rt-users] RT and the Perl Dependency Nightmare...

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2005-09-07 at 20:54, Timothy E Miller wrote:

> Is there any official list that indicates the correct order for
> building and installing the multitude of Perl modules from CPAN?
> I'm running into some strange circular dependencies.

I recently made everything work on an up to date Centos4 box
by installing Pod::Tests first with CPAN (for the apparently 
moved  pod2test), then a force install of WWW:Mechanize and
Test::More.  Then running the RT script should pick up
everything else.

> Also, e.g. since there's this problem with pod2test disappearing and
> making the WWW::Mechanize (or was it Test::WWW::Mechanize?!?) module
> die upon building, do the RT folks have a repository of all the Perl
> module sources required for a successful end product that are
> publicly available to pair up with the RT release (specifically
> 3.4.4) that we can simply grab and rebuild?

I think the WWW::Mechanize problem happens regardless of the
source version.  It looks like it is testing content from
an internet location that has changed or is no longer
available.

> And while I've got your attention, how does everyone else handle the
> fact that there are ~100 perl modules from CPAN required for RT that
> are randomly (almost chaotically) changing individually and in
> almost certainly incompatible ways?
> 
> I'm just trying to get a handle on it, that's all.

It would be nice if those were all bundled into our favorite
OS distributions.  However, if someone else packages them
in a way that the system package manger understands there
will be new conflicts if they are later included in the
distribution.   I'm not sure there is an answer better than
wading through the CPAN install problems as they happen.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     les at futuresource.com