Using RPMs to package and install your own perl libs

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

I wanted to use RPMs as the package format for my various personal perl libs. These would have dependencies pulled from CPAN, as well as dependencies on each other.

I've looked through the RPM::Specfile and cpanflute2. To be honest it wasn't clear what cpanflute2 did (does it try to generate a Specfile)? The RPM guide for developers (max RPM) seems pretty good, but it seems like a lot of it is addressing compiled sources (I guess perl is just a lot easier since you don't have to compile it).

It would be great if I could use this as the basis of deployment for a production system (RedHat). But it's not clear to me what the various issues are or how to structure things. I was going to deconstruct some of the fedora perl RPMs and see what I could glean.

Could someone who uses RPMs in this way give me some advice or point me to some examples?

Comment on Using RPMs to package and install your own perl libs

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Re: Using RPMs to package and install your own perl libs by tomfahle (Priest) on Feb 18, 2009 at 06:19 UTC
Well, it ain't that easy. Dave Cross gave a talk at YAPC::Europe 2008 "Perl in RPM-Land" and launched a project to automatically build RPMs from all modules uploaded to CPAN. Fedora offers some help on Packaging:Perl and cpanspec Hth, Thomas	[reply]
Re^2: Using RPMs to package and install your own perl libs by zerohero (Monk) on Feb 18, 2009 at 08:16 UTC
OK, after looking at this information, it seems like the much saner thing would be to adhere to the CPAN standard for packaging (e.g. using Module::Starter), and then do a local cpaninject, and use cpan to deploy all my (local) perl packages. This has the slight downside that perl will be "an end in itself". But then again, I'm not going to use perl as base libraries for other programs (e.g. GUI apps). The basic issue seems to be mixing packaging systems, and the usual problems having two standards causes. Note, however, that there have been people doing auto RPM builds as early as 2003. I stumbled upon this guy's site...http://rpmpan.sourceforge.net/, in addition to the ref you gave.	[reply]
Re^3: Using RPMs to package and install your own perl libs by tomfahle (Priest) on Feb 18, 2009 at 11:36 UTC
I'd like to recommend Perl Best Admin Practices over at Perl 5 Wiki: Build it yourself Leave the system Perl alone Isolate your perl installs so you can have many installed in parallel Keep up to date Use CPAN modules Cheers, Thomas	[reply]
Re^2: Using RPMs to package and install your own perl libs by gsiems (Deacon) on Feb 18, 2009 at 19:33 UTC
I just set up cpanspec on my CentOS4 box to give it a spin. Although getting it setup was slightly annoying (not all the dependencies are available without going to EPEL, etc. or to CPAN), however it appears to work very nicely. ++ and thanks for the tip.	[reply]


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