Re: Distribution installer that defaults to Debian? Code at github!!
Hi Joel,
another think that you should not forget about is that you never know what
version of the module is in the Debian package. You can guess but you can be
never be sure as module authors as really sloppy. Some have VERSION only in the
main distribution module, some keep old version numbers around and some to make
us even more crazy put higher version, than the distribution have, in the child
.pm files.
May be you will be also interested in https://github.com/jozef/Debian-Apt-PM/ no
one was so far so don't worry if you won't ;-)
The basic idea is that is is not possible to know exactly Module:Name <->
libpackage-perl mapping. The apt-file method does a good job but the versions
are missing. There for there is a script/dpkg-scanpmpackages that can go through
a Debian repository, extract all .deb files (a huge job in the beginning,
incremental afterwards) and index all .pm files that are founded there. You can
see an example of the output here:
http://pkg-perl.alioth.debian.org/~jozef-guest/pmindex/dists/squeeze/main/binary-i386/PerlPackages.bz2
http://debian.meon.sk/mirror/ is not really a mirror. The "Packages*" files are
all empty so it is safe to put it in /etc/apt/sources.list the apt will not
complain about unknown signatures on unknown empty repositories. But when you do
this the script/apt-pm will look through all these repositories for
PerlPackages.bz2 and use this index to look-up Perl modules in deb packages.
This allows the freedom to use stable/testing/unstable/local repositories based
on the personal taste and preferences.
When `apt-pm update` is run, the indexes are put to /var/cache/apt/apt-pm/ and
to find a distribution based on module name just do:
# apt-pm find Module::Build
libmodule-build-perl_0.360700-1_all: Module::Build 0.3607
libmodule-build-perl_0.2808.01-2_all: Module::Build 0.2808_01
perl-modules_5.10.1-17_all: Module::Build 0.340201
Note also that there are some patches
patches/DhMakePerl.pm.patch # old dh-make-perl
patches/FromCPAN.pm.patch # newer dh-make-perl (not sure how up to date)
patches/Distribution.pm.patch # CPAN::Distribution to prefer installing deb
over directly CPAN with `cpan`
Just to get an inspiration. I hope that cpanminus will find a clean way how to
hook into dependency installing process so that all os types
(Linux/Mac/Windows/...) will be able to prefer own packages over installing from
cpan.
Cheers,
Jozef
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