Cranky old timers should know perl

I act like an old timer (I’ve been around linux for 25 years and I’m cranky about new tech that is not easily maintained and upgraded) yet somehow I don’t know perl. How did that happen?

I discovered this state when I decided to move from the heroically packaged yet seemingly upstream un-maintained opendmarc package to authentication_milter.

It’s written in perl. And, alas, not in debian.

How hard could this be?

The instructions for installing seemed pretty straight forward: cpanm Mail::Milter::Authentication.

Wah. I’m glad I tried this out on a test virtual machine. It took forever! It ran tests! It compiled things! And, it installed a bunch of perl modules already packaged in Debian.

I don’t think I want to add this command to my ansible playbook.

Next I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how to list the dependencies of a given CPAN module. I was looking for something like cpanm --list-dependencies Mail::Milter::Authentication but eventually ended up writing a perl script that output perl code, inserting a “use " before each dependency and a semicolon and line break after them. Then, I could execute that script on a clean debian installation and see which perl modules I needed. For each error, I checked for the module in Debian (and installed it) or kept a list of modules I would have to build (and commented out the line).

Once I had a list of modules to build, I used the handy cpan2deb command. It took some creative ordering but eventually I got it right. Since I will surely forget how to do this when it’s time to upgrade, I wrote a script.

In total it took me several days to figure this all out, so I once again find myself very appreciative of all the debian packagers out there - particularly the perl ones!!

And also… if I did this all wrong and there is an easier way I would love to hear about it in the comments.