Weblog entry #138 for simonw
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#138
Perl Upgrades
Posted by simonw on Wed 24 Jan 2007 at 16:57
CPAN has an evil command "upgrade", that does much the same as "apt-get dist-upgrade", but for any Perl modules on the system rather than Debian packages.
Running it can be "interesting", as CPAN doesn't have that concept of release, and so APIs may change underneath. The advice here is usually to manage Perl modules as Debian packages, but if you don't do that, you need to appreciate that things will break, and that you'll have to know some Perl (and extra stuff) to fix things.
Today I learnt;
Postgrey does different things depending on whether Sys::Syslog is installed.
Sys::Syslog changed its interface since Sarge was release.
Debian package maintainer for libembperl-perl (Angus Lees) knows more about Apache, and Perl than I think I want to.
They are right about putting the modules into Debian packages for revision control (I always believed them).
I suspect I owe Angus a beverage of his choice, but the upside is Angus doesn't know who I am. Both Exeter, and Edinburgh are a long way from Australia ;)
Running it can be "interesting", as CPAN doesn't have that concept of release, and so APIs may change underneath. The advice here is usually to manage Perl modules as Debian packages, but if you don't do that, you need to appreciate that things will break, and that you'll have to know some Perl (and extra stuff) to fix things.
Today I learnt;
Postgrey does different things depending on whether Sys::Syslog is installed.
Sys::Syslog changed its interface since Sarge was release.
Debian package maintainer for libembperl-perl (Angus Lees) knows more about Apache, and Perl than I think I want to.
They are right about putting the modules into Debian packages for revision control (I always believed them).
I suspect I owe Angus a beverage of his choice, but the upside is Angus doesn't know who I am. Both Exeter, and Edinburgh are a long way from Australia ;)
Comments on this Entry
Posted by dkg (216.254.xx.xx) on Wed 24 Jan 2007 at 21:11
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I do my best to use debianized packages for perl, instead of the moving target of CPAN, for the reasons you describe, as well as the convenience of filesystem tracking by dpkg. But CPAN has way more perl modules available than debian does.
dh-make-perl provides a simple way to debianize perl modules which aren't already in the repository. I find it useful.
Here's my telegraphic notes about doing this for one such package.
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Posted by Steve (80.68.xx.xx) on Thu 25 Jan 2007 at 09:42
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I do the same thing, with many of the perl modules require to run this code available upon my apt-repository.
There is a tendency for me to forget about updating them, but that might be better than blindly upgrading with no roll-back facility!
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