ego.istic.org

I tried CPANPLUS::Dist::Deb today. I can't say I was very impressed. The most annoying thing is that it seems to break chasing down dependencies, which takes you back to the CPAN dark ages of vgrepping through its copious output to spot which modules were missing and recursing by hand.

It does have the sane feature that it expresses dependencies as dpkg dependencies, and depends on cpan-libdistribution-name-perl | lib-distribution-name-perl, the former being the package name it generates, and the latter being the format of the package names in the Debian archive. The problem is, not all Debian package names have the same name as the CPAN distribution name. For example, Template-Toolkit is in Debian as libtemplate-perl, but C::D::D-generated debs depend on the expected name libtemplate-toolkit-perl, which is then unavailable unless you build it yourself. OK, I can see this would be hard for the C::D::D author to work around, but it's still an annoyance to me as a user.

The other major misfeature is that the generated debs put their files in /usr/local, which is a big no-no for anything managed by the package manager.

CPANPLUS has made my life much easier, and in my workflow it has replaced CPAN completely. But until CPANPLUS::Dist::Deb generates Debian packages that Just Work, or debian.pkgs.cpan.org starts serving packages for amd64, I'll be sticking with clunky old cpanp -i.

I find through conversation that many of the people who hate Perl do so because they found CPAN difficult to work with. Perl has had a chance here to sweep all its usability woes out of the way ready for the birth of 6PAN, and it's all been thrown away.