(CC replies, I'm not subscribed to this list.)
I was thinking of how to solve the problem of installing modules
from CPAN for non-technical users, especially ones that don't have
root access. I had the following design requirements:
-Must work with at least perl 5.6 and 5.5, preferrably 5.4
too
-Must be as simple as possible - perl -MCPAN -e shell, even
for people with root, asks too many questions
I wrote a script for one of my projects, getmodules, that does much
of this:
http://www.zevils.com/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/imirc/getmodules
(The main modification I'd like to make to it is to have it fill
in defaults for CPAN config for everything except mirror selection;
and for mirror selection, pick a random mirror in the user's
country.)
The way it would work would be that you distribute a program
and have it "use CPAN::Auto" as the first use statement.
You include CPAN/Auto.pm with your program, and maybe
do some BEGIN jujitsu to make sure that dirname($0) is in @INC.
Then it detects when you try to use a module that isn't present.
(Would overriding "use" via sub work for that?) Probably
also have some way to specify that certain modules are optional
and shouldn't be auto-installed if they're not present...
Anyway, when it sees that you're trying to use something that
isn't there, it'll go and install it from CPAN, and then
load it.
You would also be able to, say, put -MCPAN::Auto in PERL5OPT
to do this magic for all scripts.
Any thoughts on this?
--
Matthew Sachs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.zevils.com/ * GPG key: 0x600A0342 * PGP key: 0x93EA1151
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