Sometimes I feel like the only adult at the playground, desperately trying, in vein, to get the kids to play nice, but they refuse to do so!
I love CPAN! There is no other library like it. So well organized, incredibly comprehensive, and an amazingly large contributor base. It is beautiful for the code and for the community.
I love Debian! The best of all Linux distributions, Debian offers usability to the Linux community, even to the server maintainers, and for the most part, applications just plain work when installed via the apt package manager.
In the last year or two its become clear the CPAN and Debian should be put on naughty spots or some other such punishment as their interaction has made me, a long time user of both, very frustrated. I recently started renting a dedicated server from ServerPronto in preparation for the upcoming release of List Central. This required that I build a new Debian machine to have all of the applications and modules that I like to use. Everything was going beautifully until I reached the task of installing my 3rd party Perl modules. I’ve been a Perl programmer for quite a few years now, so my instinct was to go to CPAN and install via the command line. Over and over again the installation of my modules, ones that work perfectly on my home server, failed, with very lengthy and arcane error messages. Through much googling and trail and error I found the answer in pre-built Debian packages that are to be installed via the apt package manager that provide my much loved Perl modules. It took 2 frustrating days to figure out which CPAN modules had a corresponding Debian package to install, and which needed CPAN.
The effort to bring CPAN and Debian into sync is evident in this migration of Perl modules to Debian packages, but it misses the mark. As with many open source projects it seems that the developers have once again forgotten about the user. Why does CPAN burp up a bunch of garbage when I try to install modules that have Debian packages to install instead? Would it really be too hard to have CPAN figure out that I’m on Debian, and tell me that there is a package that I should be installing instead?
Linux is growing in popularity, and Debian (with Ubuntu) is at the forefront. Communication with the user has to be made a priority, or else frustrations like this one are likely to cause people to go back to the alternatives they are used to.
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Maybe it will be easier to provide building system for each OS and package type: deb, rpm, ebuild, etc? And later install it in system instead of mixing cpan buidls, debian builds etc?
This should be like: deb-cpan install Some::CPAN::Module
This command should also build dependicies and install it, well dreaming;