Brand Spanking New Perl... By Accident
After my last adventure with Perl, I was wishing I could upgrade my Perl 5.8.2 to 5.8.3 without breaking anything. I had learned that the “autobundle” command of CPAN can create a giant archive module of all your modules to make reinstallation of them easy after an upgrade.
In testing autobundle, however, I ran into an immediate problem. While I could easily create my autobundle, I couldn’t re-install it. The message I received was: “Warning: Cannot install Bundle::Snapshot_2004_03_31_00.pm, don’t know what it is.” I Googled for help with this, but came up dry. There’s a lesson to be learned here. Whenever you have a problem that no one else has ever had (apparently), it means you’re probably doing something incredibly boneheaded and not encountering some rare bug. This was true in my case, as well. Perl modules and bundles have extensions of .pm, but in CPAN you don’t use it. All I had to do was chop the extension off of Snapshot_2004_03_31_00.pm and all was well.
In reading the output from the reinstallation, there were some modules it was having trouble with, so I tried installing one manually, using “force.” This particular module is reportedly included with the new version of Perl, so CPAN merrily set about installing Perl 5.8.3! Not what I had in mind, of course, but it all went well. I have a shiny new Perl and all updated modules. Ain’t technology wunnerful?