John Andersen wrote:
I wish more people would use CPAN for perl things. I don't understand why people want to use RPMs for this, I've always done Spamassassin this way and its So easy.
Because then (almost) everything on the system is managed by rpm, or dpkg, or $favourite_package_manager. CPAN only knows about Perl modules; if some third-party program includes Perl hooks your package manager needs to know about the required modules. If you've installed from CPAN or source (same thing, for the most part) then the package manager doesn't know about them.
There *are* workarounds - cpanflute, cpan2rpm and their counterpart(s) in Debian for instance - but it's often easier to find someone else's package than roll your own.
It's also IMPOSSIBLE to install a Perl module that requires C code to be compiled if you don't have a C compiler installed. I, for one, prefer to keep my production servers compiler-less. I build a module package on a development box, and install it on a set of servers.
-kgd