Re: Most maintainable way to install perl modules on Debian sysetms
Hello,
On Sun, Nov 15, 2020 at 08:14:05PM -0500, Michael Grant wrote:
> > Well, that would do the job thoughtlessly. It might backfire
> > spectacularly.
[…]
> apt has an excellent reputation, I'm not sure I see why mechanizing
> such a process as apt does should be necessarily be bad. I'm not
> talking about blind nightly updates.
The issue is that somewhere behind the scenes is a human being, the
Debian package maintainer, who is backporting security fixes (but
not new features!) from newer releases of the module into a Debian
package for a given Debian release.
That's not a mechanical process.
So when proposing to adopt a mechanical process, it's not comparable
to what an actually maintained Debian package is like; it's just a
CPAN module in a convenient format.
Most of the time the upstream author is mindful of backward
compatibility issues and isn't going to release something onto CPAN
that breaks things, but sometimes it's unavoidable and sometimes the
author isn't mindful of this. There is a big variance in quality of
CPAN modules.
So probably the best thing you can do is cpan2deb and stick with
those versions that you have tested, unless an update comes along
with security fixes or features you need.
You can install the package "cpanoutdated" which will tell you about
newer versions on CPAN compared to on your system, though it will
report quite a lot of packaged stuff as being outdated, which is
only to be expected.
Cheers,
Andy
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