cpan: Terminal does not support AddHistory.

[kcott]

I have been seeing the following, for the past 18 months, every time I use the cpan utility:

$ cpan
Terminal does not support AddHistory.

To fix that, maybe try>  install Term::ReadLine::Perl

cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation (v2.28)
Enter 'h' for help.

cpan[1]>

I looked into that briefly (and unsuccessfully) several times; in general, whatever I wanted to install via cpan was more important than AddHistory, which I only use infrequently anyway, so it ended up on my TODO list.

I tried with the suggested module, Term::ReadLine::Perl, as well as a variety of others including: Term::ReadLine::Perl5, Term::ReadLine::Gnu, and Term::ReadLine::Tiny. These all failed, the most common problem being the process hanging when the Term::ReadKey dependency was being installed. Actually, installation of Term::ReadLine::Tiny worked fine but it didn't provide AddHistory.

I spent some hours this morning looking into this and eventually came up with a solution. My basic Perl setup is: Win10 - Cygwin - Perlbrew - Perl 5.32.0. If you're experiencing the same problem, this solution may work for you: I can't make any guarantees as I don't have other systems on which to test this.

The only thing that worked was a completely manual installation.

Download https://cpan.metacpan.org/authors/id/J/JS/JSTOWE/TermReadKey-2.38.tar.gz then run the familiar incantation:

$ tar zxvf TermReadKey-2.38.tar.gz
$ cd TermReadKey-2.38
$ perl Makefile.PL
$ make
$ make test
$ make install

Download https://cpan.metacpan.org/authors/id/H/HA/HAYASHI/Term-ReadLine-Gnu-1.37.tar.gz then a very similar incantation:

$ tar zxvf Term-ReadLine-Gnu-1.37.tar.gz
$ cd Term-ReadLine-Gnu-1.37
$ perl Makefile.PL
$ make
$ make test
$ make install

Now I get:

$ cpan

cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation (v2.28)
Enter 'h' for help.

cpan[1]>

and moving through the command history and editing is now possible.

If you were experiencing similar problems with a different setup to me — and found this worked as is, worked after some modification, or failed abysmally — please leave a note for the next reader.

[Don Coyote]

Hello kcott

Using perl 5, version 14, subversion 2 (v5.14.2) built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread, and running debugger from cmd with the -d switch, a warning about SetConsoleMode failed at line 277 Term::ReadKey.pm is produced.

I looked into it a little bit and found the issue to be literal backticks being used in Term::ReadKey. That is to say there was no fail message when I (iirc) replaced with perl function system call. As described in Mastering Perl, using the first element of array code sub form.

I thought I had posted a SoPW about that, though cannot find any related threads; may have been chatterbox. I did not follow up with a bug report, due to only reproducing on an earlier than current version.

I recently acquired perl 5, version 30, subversion 1 (v5.30.1) built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread and can confirm there are no warnings produced when running debugger via switch.

However, Corelist doesn't appear to mention Term::Readkey as being released with core, and as such is explainably not shipped with the vendor version. Term::ReadLine has been included with Core since at most v5.2, and was updated as recently as v5.27.4

[kcott]

G'day Don Coyote,

++ Thanks for posting the report.

I have cygwin-thread-multi (not MSWin32-x86-multi-thread) Perl versions, so I'm not in a position to comment further on that.

[Anonymous Monk]

Ahoy 3 years later!

To get this to work I also had to install the libreadline package, which on ubuntu is

sudo apt install libreadline6 libreadline6-dev

I think you might be able to just install libreadline-dev, but I did it the above way and it worked. Then I had to run

cpan 
install Log::Log4perl

Now I can use up and down to scroll through history, but I also get this message.

Starting with version 2.29 of the cpan shell, a new download mechanism
is the default which exclusively uses cpan.org as the host to download
from. The configuration variable pushy_https can be used to (de)select
the new mechanism. Please read more about it and make your choice
between the old and the new mechanism by running

    o conf init pushy_https

Once you have done that and stored the config variable this dialog
will disappear.

So basically 0 means use the urllist, and 1 or undef means only ever use CPAN and ignore the urllist. Apparently this was in response to a spoofing attack a couple years ago but could cause problems if you try to use a mirror or something like that. There is a question and response about it on stack overlow. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75523351/cpan-not-using-configured-repo-instead-trying-to-connect-to-cpan-org-when-instal So I ran

o conf pushy_https 0
o conf commit

So after that I finally get

cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation (v2.36)
Enter 'h' for help.

And I can scroll through my log and no more errors or warnings on startup. Thanks for the heads up man. I stumbled on this trying to install Gtk2 and Gnome2::Canvas which also dont work unless you install them manually from source. Thanks and Good Luck!