[Wylug-help] .deb equivs

[Aaron Crane]

Smylers writes:
> Aaron Crane writes:
> > Smylers writes:
> > > I wish to install a .deb package which depends on libcpanplus-perl.
> > 
> > Is that the exact spelling of the dependency that your .deb specifies?
> 
> Yes.  I've previously used it on older Ubuntu systems which have Perl
> 5.8; it comes from here:
> 
>   http://debian.pkgs.cpan.org/debian/main/pool/cpan-lib/c/cpan-libcpanplus-perl/

Ah.  That's particularly annoying; that's the expected name for this
package.

> > The Debian/Ubuntu perl-modules package Provides: libcpan-plus-perl
> > (which is admittedly surprising, but that's nonetheless what they
> > have).
> 
> I've been unable to find a package of that name anywhere, so I'm
> wondering if it's a typo.  The spelling I have has been added as a
> Provides: in the latest perl-modules in debian-unstable:

It could well be a typo, especially given the change to Provides:.

> I was trying to install CPANPLUS::Dist::Deb, so as to be able to
> build .deb packages of Cpan modules.  Since CPANPLUS::Dist::Deb is
> itself a Cpan module, I was hoping that a pre-packaged version of
> that module would solve the obvious bootstrap issue.

Fortunately, that bootstrapping issue is easy to solve -- look into
dh-make-perl.  You may even be able to do something as simple as

  dh-make-perl --install --cpan CPANPLUS::Dist::Deb

It's also possible that dh-make-perl will meet all your needs, so
that you can avoid CPANPLUS::Dist::Deb entirely.

CPANPLUS::Dist::Deb has never seemed reliable to me, even before I knew
that debian.pkgs.cpan.org didn't have packages that could be expected
to work on recent Debian and Ubuntu systems.  My particular concerns
with it are the lack of non-Perl dependencies and build-dependencies,
and the impossibility of automatically generating .deb package versions
from CPAN distribution version numbers in the general case.  Both of
these flaws are surely fixable, though; I regret I haven't yet made
time to investigate them more fully.

-- 
Aaron Crane ** http://aaroncrane.co.uk/