Re: Why aren't the actual module names in the package descriptions?
On Sat, 12 Nov 2005, John M. Gabriele wrote:
> Last week I needed Mail::Mailer on a Debian Woody machine, and
> wanted to use apt-get to install it.
>
> apt-cache search perl | grep -i mailer
>
> returns nothing (on Woody *or* Sarge).
This is the wrong way to search for specific modules, unfortunatly.
Do this instead:
aptitude install apt-file; apt-file update; apt-file search Mail/Mailer;
or:
visit packages.debian.org and search by package contents.
> 1. Why doesn't the "apt-cache show" description usually list the
> module names? (I see that it *is* properly listed for, say, the
> libtext-template-perl package.)
Developers have in certain instances, but some packages contain
thousands of modules:
$ dpkg -L libmail-box-perl|grep '.pm$'|wc -l
117
FE. [Which is probably the module you really want to use if you wrote
this perl code.]
> 3. (though this might be off-topic here) Why does CPAN use that
> "MailTools" name? Why is it grouping those Mail::* modules that way?
Because that's what the author calls the package.
> It seems to me that it should be standard practice to list in a Perl
> package's description exactly which modules it is supplying.
For smaller sets of modules, yes. But in some of the larger cases, it
can't be done sanely. That's what apt-file and packages.debian.org is
for.
Don Armstrong
--
Identical parts aren't.
-- Beach's Law
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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