Re: Should cpanminus be part of the standard Perl release?

(I originally made comments similar to the below in the ChatterBox on 2018-06-01T08:43:37-0500, but adding here for comment by others.)

As some may not be familiar with cpanminus (or other CPAN clients), perhaps it might be of benefit to provide (possibly as one or more tutorials or meditations) a comparison of cpanminus to other common CPAN clients, showing the strengths (and, my hope, the weaknesses also) of both, and illustrating the reason(s) you believe there is (or is not) a benefit to doing so.

(Personally, I believe I only tried cpanminus on one occasion, and I honestly only remember that it used a different directory structure to my normal CPAN usage ("perl -MCPAN -e 'shell;'"), and thinking that if one were experimenting with different CPAN clients how much space could be "wasted" in the process.)

Comment on Re: Should cpanminus be part of the standard Perl release?

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Re^2: Should cpanminus be part of the standard Perl release? by marto (Cardinal) on Jun 01, 2018 at 13:27 UTC
"perhaps it might be of benefit to provide (possibly as one or more tutorials or meditations) a comparison of cpanminus to other common CPAN clients, " I'm working on something as a background task, which has a hefty section on this very subject. I'll keep you posted. "and thinking that if one were experimenting with different CPAN clients how much space could be "wasted" in the process." cpanm has it's advantages, one being speed, it's simply a lot faster. It's also much lighter on resources, where cpan dies, e.g. installing things on an embedded, or otherwise resource limited system.	[reply]
Re^3: Should cpanminus be part of the standard Perl release? by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jun 02, 2018 at 00:00 UTC
cpanm has it's advantages, one being speed, it's simply a lot faster. How can that be? cpan and cpanm are simply front ends for the installers provided by the distributions.	[reply]
Re^4: Should cpanminus be part of the standard Perl release? by marto (Cardinal) on Jun 24, 2018 at 16:05 UTC
This isn't strictly true, both packages work differently, as the anonymonk has commented on. Shortly I'll be in a position to demonstrate some evidence/test cases.	[reply]
Re^4: Should cpanminus be part of the standard Perl release? by Anonymous Monk on Jun 07, 2018 at 22:32 UTC
How can that be? cpan and cpanm are simply front ends for the installers provided by the distributions. Because it never tries to download `1,781,641 02packages.details.txt.gz` and then unzip/load into a `44,652,400 sourcefiles.s2.39.c0.9133.stored` or `21,497,461 Metadata` or a `18,997,248 cpandb.sql` These numbers are a 2-6 years old, thats when I switched to cpanminus away from cpanplus and rarely cpan	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Should cpanminus be part of the standard Perl release? by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jun 01, 2018 at 23:55 UTC
That would be awesome! I can't count the number of times I've asked why one would want to use `cpanm`, and the only answer I've gotten (that didn't lie about `cpan`) was that it works better on systems with less space (such as embedded systems), and that it hides the output of the installation tools when there's no error (which still hides useful information). (Obviously, `cpanm` is less configurable, but noone actually needs the extra configurability of `cpan`, so I won't count it against `cpanm`).	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Should cpanminus be part of the standard Perl release? by Tux (Canon) on Jun 03, 2018 at 10:05 UTC
Noone? Please count again. Maybe/probably a minority, but I personally know quite a few people that use the configuration of `cpan` to some extent. I have no idea if any of the other CPAN clients supports distroprefs the way `cpan` does. If `cpanm` does not (I would not know, I don't use it), it would be the reason not to use it. Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^4: Should cpanminus be part of the standard Perl release? by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jun 06, 2018 at 07:39 UTC
Ah cool. Would love to hear how.	[reply]


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