Why aren't the actual module names in the package descriptions?
(This post is about an issue I've seen with other Debian Perl
packages, but uses libmailtools-perl as an example.)
Last week I needed Mail::Mailer on a Debian Woody machine, and
wanted to use apt-get to install it.
Trying:
apt-cache search perl | grep -i mailer
returns nothing (on Woody *or* Sarge).
After some searching and guessing, I eventually discovered
that the package I wanted to install is libmailtools-perl.
I tried:
apt-cache show libmailtools-perl
But found no mention of which Perl modules this package
contains. The description merely says:
| Description: Manipulate email in perl programs
| This is a set of perl modules which provide an easy interface to
| manipulating email in an object-oriented fashion.
The way I guessed that this might be the right package was
by searching CPAN, which pointed me to:
http://search.cpan.org/~markov/MailTools-1.67/Mail/Mailer.pm
(then noticed the name "MailTools" there).
So my questions to this list are:
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.)
2. Given that you know the module you'd like to install, how, in-
general, can you get apt-cache to tell you which package to install?
3. (though this might be off-topic here) Why does CPAN use that
"MailTools" name? Why is it grouping those Mail::* modules that
way?
It seems to me that it should be standard practice to list in a
Perl package's description exactly which modules it is supplying.
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