cpan

Another day wrestling with Perl and versioning. I've been using Catalyst, which is great, but a few times, it has installed OK, then just failed to find stuff when I run it. I thought it was an old version of Perl first time, but today I got exactly the same behaviour with a brand new clean install of Perl.

The issue happens with ActiveState's PPMs, which you'd think would handle versioning, and to some extent it does. It stipulates which version is needed as a dependency. The issue seems to be that different parts of Catalyst are depending on different versions of something somewhere, so when you install Catalyst followed by Catalyst-Runtime, you get a different combination than if you do Catalyst-Runtime followed by Catalyst. The same thing doesn't happen with the cpan command line installer, but that upgrades almost everything everywhere, with no clear audit trail or reproducability, so that is less than desirable.

Anyway, it seemed today that:

ppm repo add http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms
ppm install Catalyst
ppm install Catalyst-Runtime --force
ppm install Catalyst-Model-DBIC-Schema
ppm install Catalyst-View-TT
ppm install Catalyst-Action-RenderView


would get the basics of Catalyst in place and working correctly. Some other modules might be needed later, but this is the core. I have no clear rationale for the "--force", which is needed whichever way things happen, but the "--force" needed if you install Catalyst-Runtime first seems to break Catalyst in an odd way somewhere internally. If I ever figure out where and how to fix it, I'll blog it.

By the way, I think Randy Kobes deserves outstanding credit for maintaining his repository so well and for so long. I've been using it since early in the 00's.