[SWLUG] Problms with Cpan installing

[Justin Mitchell]

On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 15:38 +0000, Neil Jones wrote:
> THanks to everyone who helped and lots of advice last night I have made
> sopme progress with installations.
> 
> I may have to ask this question in a more specialised forum but I get
> masses and masses of errors from
> cpan -i Image::Magick

first off, try and learn to use 'yum search' to find things.

'yum search Magick' reveals the existance of the ImageMagick-perl rpm,
so you can just do 'yum install ImageMagick-perl' instead.

if some package your looking for isnt in the distrubutions yum
repository then you can try one of the alternate ones which contain all
sorts of ready built packages. eg. 
http://www.freshrpms.net 
http://www.atrpms.net 
http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/

all of which provide extra yum config files to ease the installation.

if that fails, then you can look on www.rpmfind.net for prospective
ready built rpms of what you want.

or try a tool called 'cpan2rpm' (can be found on the atrpms yum repo)
which can download cpan modules and build rpms of them for you, that way
you can more easily uninstall or upgrade them later.

programs like cpan, which install files arbitrarily into your
filesystem, with no kind of package management, should be a last resort.


> Secondly how do I stop or store the output. I have tried sending it
> though "more" this does nothing sending it to a file "> holdfile"
> doesn't work either. I just might get a clue if I could see the
> beginning of the errors before they race off the screen.
on useful thing is to type 'script' before running any commands, then
'exit' when done. everything inbetween will be stored in the file
'typescript'

the reason you cant more or redirect it is that being errors the
messages are comming out of stderr (file handle 2) instead of stdout
(file handle 1) which more and redirect normal act upon.

there are ways to combine stderr with stdout
eg  ./myprogram 2>&1  | more

or direct stderr seperately from the 'normal' output
./myprog 2>error.log  >output.log