Best practice for releasing Perl modules to staging and live

[Minty]

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 4:16 PM, Richard Huxton <dev at archonet.com> wrote:
> ian wrote:
>> One company I worked at did just this for CPAN modules, but it was a
>> many-day exercise to work out all the dependencies of (for example) Catalyst
>> and to build them all into Debian packages.
>
> This is the bit that interests me. How do you find out...
>
> 1. What modules do I need to install/upgrade to install module M version  V?
>
> 2. Given my currently installed set of modules, what is the latest version
> of module M that I can install?

One gotcha I've stumbled upon here is the version numbers.  Debian's
system and CPAN's don't always mesh well.  I believe it's possible to
get a cpan version going from 1.39 to 1.4 but the debian stack would
want the equivalent package to be 1.40.  This isn't a common problem,
and seems mostly confined to newer/more-obscure cpan dists.

I use dpkg-buildpackage, which does a half decent job of parsing the
CPAN package and using the various meta files to find stated
dependencies.

  dpkg --compare-versions 0.3-0.9minty lt 0.3-0.10lt && echo yes || echo no

can help you figure out if debian thinks one version number is better
than another.