Setup: cpan · Jan 12, 10:03 AM by Dylan Doxey
Every once in a while I find myself starting up cpan on a fresh machine. The first thing cpan wants to do is refer to its configuration module for information about its dependent utilities such as lynx and ncftpget.
The the configuration module is located at:
~/.cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm
Or in some cases:
/etc/perl/CPAN/Config.pm
In this module you'll find the definition of a hash ref called $CPAN::Config. Clearly cpan intends to 'do' this module to become aware of where its favorite binaries are located. Among other things, it's specifically interested in:
'ftp' => q[/usr/bin/ftp], 'gpg' => q[/usr/bin/gpg], 'gzip' => q[/bin/gzip], 'lynx' => q[/usr/bin/lynx], 'make' => q[/usr/bin/make], 'ncftp' => q[/usr/bin/ncftp], 'tar' => q[/bin/tar], 'unzip' => q[/usr/bin/unzip], 'wget' => q[/usr/bin/wget],
So, to make the cpan setup process go as quickly as possible you might install any missing dependencies first. For my typical (X)Ubuntu systems, I have only needed:
sudo apt-get install lynx sudo apt-get install ncftp
Because your mileage may vary, here's a complete list:
sudo apt-get install ftp sudo apt-get install getcwd sudo apt-get install gpg sudo apt-get install gzip sudo apt-get install lynx sudo apt-get install make sudo apt-get install ncftp sudo apt-get install tar sudo apt-get install unzip sudo apt-get install wget
It's also worth noting at this point that if your going to use cpan much, then you will inevitably see the message "install seems impossible" when you're attempting to install some module. The first few times I saw this, I ranted quite a bit regarding the sense of saying something is "impossible" to install from source, and then found some non-cpan or non-Perl workaround.
On [X]?Ubuntu systems you can resolve this by installing the build-essentials package. Looking into the .deb file I found a list of the "essential packages", which are essential for compiling Perl modules.
essential-packages-list
base-files base-passwd bash bsdutils coreutils debianutils diff dpkg e2fsprogs findutils grep gzip hostname login mktemp mount ncurses-base ncurses-bin perl-base sed sysvinit tar util-linux
Just for the record, you install build-essentials like this:
sudo apt-get install build-essentials
UPDATE: You might need to specify build-essential (singular case) like this:
sudo apt-get install build-essential
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