http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=583768

j3 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm using Perl on Debian, had a look at the CPAN.pm docs, but still have some questions.

1. How do I uninstall modules?

2. When I run CPAN.pm's shell for the first time, among the list of questions it asks, it wants me to tell it which mirrors to use. In North America, USA, there's about 62 url's from which to choose. Is there some option at this point to simply ask CPAN.pm to ping some of them and automatically select the quickest and least burdened ones?

3. Is it more common for most Perlers to just install modules by-hand and not even bother with CPAN.pm (or CPANPLUS)?

4. On Debian, most modules I need are usually already available via apt-get. I'm guessing it's asking for a big mess to alternately use apt-get and CPAN.pm for the same Perl installation. What do most Debian users do regarding CPAN.pm?

5. How do I keep my CPAN.pm-installed modules up-to-date? In other words, what's the equivalent of Debian's "apt-get [update|upgrade]"?

6. According to the docs at perldoc.org, development of CPAN.pm is stalled and the module may eventually be replaced by CPANPLUS. However, search.cpan shows that both distributions seem to be pretty current. Will CPANPLUS still probably eventually replace CPAN.pm?

7. Finally, if I think I've completely botched up things using CPAN.pm, how can I wipe out everything that was installed by CPAN.pm? That is, is there a simple "rm -fr" I can do to start from scratch without touching the rest of my Perl installation?