On Mon, 12 Feb 2001, Daniel Parks wrote:

> At 2:23 PM -0800 2/12/2001, Tom Tarka wrote:
> >On Monday, February 12, 2001, at 02:14 PM, Josh Kuperman wrote:
> >  > Perl looks like a major headache. In previous environments I
> >installed the minimum and
> >  > then used CPAN to handle the rest.
>
> I don't know what CPAN is, but I had no problems compiling &
> installing Perl from pkgsrc. It's probably just as easy if you use
> the binary packages.

CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) is a sort of package system
for perl modules. From within a command line environment (the CPAN
module) you can browse, download build and install modules. CPAN can
tell you which installed modules are out-of-date, and it can even
update itself and continue.

There's a way to install perl so that the vendor modules don't
intermingle with the user installed modules, which we don't take
advantage of. Other than that, CPAN seems to work fine. Just type
"perl -MCPAN -e shell", just like it says in the CPAN(1) man page.


Frederick