Aunty Perl does it her way

Getting back to normal after installing FC9, I remembered ndw's album cover script, here. I duly tried it and of course it was missing a whole heap of modules. Last time I tried this I readily used something like:

$ perl -MCPAN -e 'Net::Amazon'

which in turn installed a whole host of other modules.. but did it, and it all just worked. Seems this is a far cleaner machine. I didn't even have CPAN.pm! Google found me looking at that with a casual comment that CPANPLUS is the place to be shortly. Mmmm

Found the module at cpan. Tried to run its perl Makefile.PL. Nope. Tells me it is short of module a (dependency hell showing). That in turn wanted lots more.... Mmmm. I went back to the readme and found

You can install all of CPANPLUS' dependencies like this, before 
installing CPANPLUS itself by running:

    $ perl bin/cpanp-boxed -s selfupdate dependencies 

Yes! Off it went, download, resolve dependencies, questionned if I wanted that (even offered a shortcut) and installed, built tested. Gently pootled about for ten minutes or so.... then

I ran the getcover.pl script and got back (n'th time) the album cover! You have to be impressed. Amonst the modules installed were some xml, basic tar and archive modules, even a file fetch. Seems perl almost re-invents the wheel. Anyway, apart from exploring cpanp which is the interactive shell, to update my perl, I'm back in business retrieving album covers for my son.

Python does it too!

Similar issue, last night I build my blog using python and found I was missing Amara from Uche and his 4suite friends. Python is catching on fast, they have a beast goes by the name of easy_install which makes python installs as easy as

$easy_install amara

Off it goes, digs out the latest, including dependencies and installs it where it should be!

I guess the lazy buggers like me, and those with wide ranging interests, should be grateful to the toolmakers of this world?