easy introduction to perl

[Jonathan Rockway]

Peter Corlett wrote:
> Umm, Catalyst is the archetype of hard-to-install CPAN modules.

Many years ago it was.  Now there just aren't all that many dependencies
for the Runtime side.  Despite David's cpandeps chart, NEXT,
Scalar::Util, Text::Balanced, Time::HiRes, and so on are in core. 
cpandeps also doesn't take into account the fact that Catalyst requires
5.8.1 and that some number of failures used for calculating the install
success rate are FAILs only on perls below 5.8.1 :)

> It is the one and only thing that I have had to relax my "must be a
> Debian package" rule for. 

Debian has the latest version and calls it "5.7010-2".

> It's too hard to track the myriad dependencies and build all those
> packages for. (And I've not yet *quite* had the itch to write a tool
> to discover the dependency tree and do a CPAN-to-.deb conversion for
> all that it finds.) 

CPANPLUS will do this with the deb-building backend.

Regards,
Jonathan Rockway