tags:

views:

311

answers:

2
+6  Q: 

How can I install a CPAN module that is in the latest perl, without installing the new perl?

I'd like to install a Perl module (in this case, FindBin), but since it is included in the perl5.10.1 distribution, cpan wants to install perl5.10 for me. Is there any way of installing just the module via cpan? The only option that I can see is installing directly from source, which seems a bit crude as there is no separate package (e.g. Makefile.PL etc), just the bare .pm file.

Since this is a small module that only has the one file, it's doable in this case, but what if I wanted to install a much larger package?

EDIT: This is somewhat aside from the original question, but speaks to the general issue of modules being packaged up with Perl distributions: I discovered that the "standalone" FindBin (version 1.49) had a syntactic error, so I retrieved version 1.50 out of the perl5.10.1 distribution... however since the module is now listed on cpan as part of perl5.10, I am unable to find the CHANGES file describing what was changed/fixed in this delta. Is it reasonable that I should have to go into the developer repository to pull out this information?)

EDIT 2. Okay, here's a better example. On perl5.8.8 I have version 1.04 of Carp. However, I see that perl5.10.1 comes packaged with version 1.11. Is there any way of getting CPAN to install the latest version of Carp for me without dragging in all of perl5.10.1? I can't even find a link to the Carp module on CPAN except to the perl5.10.1 installation.

+1  A: 

Things you can try include

  • Dropping FindBin.pm into the same directory as your executable and using use FindBin
  • Dropping FindBin.pm into your Perl library directory
  • Using the source code of the module in your script
Kinopiko  2009-10-10 00:38:14
As I said in the question: installing the source into my perl lib directory is doable in this case as it is a small module, but this is far from desirable as a general practice, and not workable at all for a larger distribution.
Ether  2009-10-10 00:43:46
Your question doesn't say that.
Kinopiko  2009-10-10 00:57:35
+3  A:  
>corelist FindBin

FindBin was first released with perl 5.00307

Which version of Perl do you use that does not include FindBin? If you use at least perl 5.6.0 (all versions before are considered deprecated), you have no need to install FindBin. If you have anything older, I suggest an upgrade to 5.6.2/5.8.9/5.10.1.

Kurila is not a "standalone" FindBin, it's a dialect of Perl. FindBin is not a dual life and is released only bundled with Perl. You can consider releasing FindBin to CPAN as standalone distribution - it is easy if you used ExtUtils::MakeMaker in past.

Latest useful change of FindBin was on 2007-04-28, related to VMS. Latest useful non-VMS change was on 2006-10-25.

Alexandr Ciornii  2009-10-10 10:56:19
Thanks, I'll give that a try next week. I could have sworn that it wasn't already installed in my distro, but I must have been mistaken.. :)
Ether  2009-10-10 15:40:05
You're right, FindBin is sitting there in `/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/FindBin.pm`, so I don't know what I was smoking before. Accepting answer... but I still wonder: **what about other modules that have been rolled into a later distribution? How can they be installed into earlier versions of perl?**
Ether  2009-10-13 17:49:01
Ether: Most of modules that were updated or added in newer perls can be installed from CPAN. For. ex, I help maintain two of them, Text::ParseWords and Win32API::File. You can update them the same way as others.
Alexandr Ciornii  2009-10-14 08:58:08
Ok, my worry was that they would only be available on cpan via the perl5.xx distribution, not as a standalone module as well. I'm building a new home system soon, so perhaps I'll find an example at that point, before fretting too much. :) thanks for the assistance!
Ether  2009-10-14 18:44:42
@Alexandr: it would seem that Carp is one distribution that is not available separately (5.10.1 has version 1.11; 5.8.8 has 1.04).
Ether  2009-11-18 00:39:11

related questions

Regex to replace Boolean with bool
How do I lock a file in Perl?
How do you use XML::Parser with Style => 'Objects'
Parsing XML Elements & Attributes with Perl
Regex to match all HTML tags except <p> and </p>
Best way to extract data from a FileMaker Pro database in a script?
What's the fastest way to determine a full URL from a relative URL (given a base URL).
Why can't I connect to my CAS server with Perl's AuthCAS?
Why can't I fetch wikipedia pages with LWP::Simple?
How do I perform a Perl substitution on a string while keeping the original?
How do I read in the contents of a directory in Perl?
How can Perl's system() print the command that it's running?
How can I test STDIN without blocking in Perl?
How do I tell if a variable has a numeric value in Perl?
Why doesn't my Perl map return anything?
How can I determine the type of a blessed reference in Perl?
Parsing attributes with regex in Perl
How do you retrieve selected text using Regex in C#?
Why does the Perl conditional operator not do what I expect?
Class::DBI-like library for php?
How do you create objects in Perl?
How do I remove duplicate items from an array in Perl?
Is The Perl Journal available online?
Can you force either a scalar or array ref to be an array in Perl?
What's the safest way to iterate through the keys of a Perl hash?