Re: Distribution installer that defaults to Debian?

[Joel Roth <joelz@pobox.com>]

On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 02:13:07PM +0200, Gabor Szabo wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 10:30 AM, Joel Roth <joelz@pobox.com> wrote:
> 
> > With the -i flag, it installs a Debian candidate
> > if available, preferring the choice of find_perl_module_packages()
> > using 'sudo apt-get install'.
> >
> > If there is no Debian candidate, it runs a cpan client
> > (cpanm if available, otherwise cpan) without 'sudo'
> > i.e. assuming local::lib.
> 
> Joel,
> 
> I wanted to have such tool for a long time! Thank you!
> 
> It would be nice to see this on CPAN to encourage distributions to
> implement the same.
> I also wonder if it could be integrated into CPAN.pm (and friends)
> itself so if I type
> 
> cpan Module::Name it will install dependencies using apt-get - if
> possible and using cpan (with local::lib)
> otherwise.
> 
> BTW what happens if a secondary dependency is available as a .deb package ?
> I mean if I am installing package X which depends on Y which in turn
> depends on W and only W is in .deb
> X and Y are not. Will your script notice this situation and install W
> using apt-get ?

Gabor,

Good idea!

To get that ability, it might be easier to patch a CPAN
client to check if version dependencies could be
met by installing Debian packages.

The CPAN client could have a --default-to-debian (or
--default-to-distribution) option that would prefer 
distribution packages as top-level targets as well as
dependencies.

Joel

> regards
>    Gabor
-- 
Joel Roth