CPAN Question

[Christopher Hicks]

On Sun, 23 Feb 2003, Mike Zanker wrote:
> On 22 February 2003 22:42 -0500 Gerry Doris <gerry at dorfam.ca> wrote:
>
> > Is there an easy way to configure CPAN to use ncftpget first?  I've
> > been looking at CPAN.pm but don't want to mess with it.
>
> The file you want to look at is Config.pm in /usr/lib/perl5/5.x.x/CPAN.

Specifically, you may want to configure a proxy (which might allow some of
the broken methods to work after all) or point the broken transfer
commands at /bin/false which time outs instantaneously.  LWP is a better
choice than any of the transfer commands though.  You may also have better
luck if you use an http server instead of an ftp one.  I've been running
an http CPAN mirror for a while now because it's so much less grief from
behind clueless firewalls, but now there a handful of official http
mirrors (at least in North America - I don't often need to check on other
continents).  And make sure before you do anything else that you upgrade
CPAN.pm itself to the latest version, quit, restart, reconfig, and then do
whatever else you wanted to do.  A number of the CPAN's that come with
major distributions (especially Red Hat) have had the nasty habit of
trying to upgrade perl - not good.

--
</chris>

"Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance."
                - Sam Brown