Perl and OpenWrt - where to the communities intersect?

[morgon]

Hi,

got me a new toy yesterday - an OpenWrt device(this one since you ask).

There is of course perl available and even modules are packaged, so you can e.g. install WWW::Mechanize via the package-manager.

But this is where it gets funny...

I've installed the perl-package and the mech-package, which pull in their dependencies, and when the install is done this fails:

use strict;

print "hi\n";

Can you spot the error?

Yes - it's strict. You need to install yet another package if you want to use strict.

Now I don't believe for a second that nothing in mech plus dependencies uses strict which makes me conclude that the dependencies that are reflected in the package-system of OpenWrt and the perl-dependencies are not friends (they probably have not even be introduced).

Which makes me wonder:

Is the wider perl-community involved here somewhere as I would like to help out to fix this.

Many thanks!

[marto]

Is perl actually a symlink to microperl? I seem to remember this being the case with wrt, and at a glance it looks like this is still the case. Various embedded system ship with mini/microperl and do this. strict has been core since perl 5. Mini/microperl are cut down, not full perl distros. If you are using a packing system you likely need to install the package which includes strict (a quick web search suggests perlbase/github link) which they do list as a dependency in their WWW::Mechanize package. This may be an issue with the package manager you used, or the packages themselves. If concerned replicate the problem, using the package manager in verbose or logging mode and discuss with the openwrt people?

[Corion]

This seems to me another case of a misguided vendor packaging some modules from the Perl core as separate packages and not including them in the "Perl" distribution, most likely to save disk space. I think this is misguided and maybe even a violation of the Artistic License (as you can only name "Perl" what really is "Perl", and leaving out things makes "Perl" "not Perl" IMO), but that doesn't solve your problem of the package manager not pulling in all packages you want/need.

I think you can get a full module dependency graph via CPANdeps (at http://deps.cpantesters.org/), and maybe even as a data structure, and then you can either fetch all those modules via the OpenWRT package manager or use that data to smarten up their dependency chain about the core modules.