Mutant has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
Hi,
I'm not sure if this is possible, but I'm trying to create a way to build a set of CPAN modules of a specific version so that this build can be repeated (e.g. on another platform).
The approach I was hoping to take was:
- Have a list of modules (preferably, but distributions would be OK) with version numbers in a text file
- Have a script that reads the list of modules, and checks whether that specific module is already installed on this system
- If it's not, it downloads the specific version of that module from CPAN (assuming it's available) and builds and installs it, including all depedencies
- Ideally it should do nothing if the module is already installed
I was hoping CPAN.pm would help me, but it seems geared towards installing only the latest version of a module. i.e. there's no way to specify a specific version to download/install. You can give it a specific distribution name, but older versions won't be in the index, so you can't find out which modules they contain, and therefore can't find out if they've already been installed on the system.
In case it's not immediately obvious, the reason I need to do this is so that I can maintain a set of CPAN modules across multiple platforms (i.e. different OSes / CPUs) which may be added to at a later date, requiring the set of modules to be re-built. For paranoid reasons, the modules need to be the same versions as exist on the other platforms.
Anyone have any ideas how to solve this?