So how do you do this?
Believe it or not, most of the work is done with a shell script. The actual building of the RPM packages is done using cpanflute2. A cron job run every night that downloads the module list from CPAN. This list of modules is then mirrored, and anything new is run through cpanflute2 to create an RPM. The shell script then goes on to generate the HTML pages, which are then mirrored up to SourceForge.A shell script, are you nuts?
Yeah.... probably. People always badmouth the shell, and sometimes with good reason, but you gotta remember that the rpm binary itself does most of the work of building RPM's by building and executing shell scripts. Shell's a lot more versitile than most people give it credit for, it's fairly portable, and lest we forget, it's the *nix way.OK... but why?
One: for the cool points. And two: well, while working as the tech editor for the book the book Linux Toys I had a need to build a batch of perl module RPM's. I quickly got bored doing that, so starting searching the web for a CPAN mirror that had RPM packages instead of tarballs. Since I couldn't find one, I figured I'd make one myself. There are a lot of good reasons to use RPM's instead of justperl -MCPAN. If that doesn't
interest you, then maybe this isn't for you. That's quite OK. But for
those who want it, here it is.
Is it perfect?
No, not really. Around 90% of the modules seem to build just fine automagically. It's that other 10% you've got to worry about. There are lots of reasons for the build to go pear shaped. If you have any doubts that a package was built properly, you should probably go straight to CPAN and grab the sources yourself.Don't you think this thing is a bit "Red Hat Centric"?
Yes. Yes I do. Why do you ask? If you're looking for some kind of justification or something, it's mostly due to some recent work I did on the book Linux Toys by Chris Negus, (who also happens to be the author of The Red Hat Linux Bible) that this project was born.Who did your artwork? Don't you know how to use GIMP?
I cobbled it together myself, don't you like it either? And nope, not really. You got a better logo, send it to me. You can get my email address from the project page.Just who are you anyway?
Why do you say it like that? But since you asked, my name is Kevin Pedigo. I'm the president of KPLUG and a member of TACLUG, a linux user since 1995, I listen to a lot of Celtic music, and I'm the only kid on my block with my own catapult, anvil, and coal bin.FAQ last updated 15 August, 2003