Funnily enough, the file in question was an old freind :)

/me withdraws the bat and impassively watches as the ball passes through to the keeper ... ;-)

It really is a pitfa that ActiveState decided to add this "feature" to PPM ... and that they implemented it in the way they have. There are a number of solutions, including the ones that you and bulk88 came up with - but none with which I'm (yet) all that comfortable.

Btw, PAR-Dist-InstallPPD will install the ppm packages without any problems - but it's not sophisiticated enough to deal automatically with pre-requisite modules and post install scripts. (Here's a demo script that installs PDL and dependencies using that module.)
Maybe I should get a version released that *does* understand how to handle post-install scripts and prerequisite modules. It's probably not of great interest to those who have ActivePerl, but is handy for any perl distros that don't have a satisfactory PPM utility.

Unfortunately, running it again means it re-downloads everything it had already downloaded

I would have hoped that it would be a simple editing operation to remove those packages that had already been installed from the profile file (prior to running again). Of course, if the upgrade doesn't process those packages in the same sequence as they are listed in the profile file, then such editing will not be so simple ...

Cheers,
Rob

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