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Comment by ratsbane | Hacker News Reader

I go back and forth on this. Aptitude seems more reliable in general than cpan, at least in the sense that cpan installations fail more frequently than apt.

Also I assume that cpan packages reflected through apt will be updated with apt-get update, while cpan has no similar update-all mechanism (AFAIK).

One advantage of using cpan is that if you're developing on a Mac and deploying on a Debian distro you can use the same commands on both systems to pull in the packages you need.

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when dealing with cpan, i think you should separate between the repository itself, which is surely more up to date than debian or ubuntu repos (because this is where debian or ubuntu pull from anyway)

and the command line interface, you have cpan, cpanp (cpan plus) and cpanm (cpan minus)

some cpan interfaces work better than others

To update all packages use:

cpan upgrade /(.*)/

That doesn't seem to work for me.

First, typing that in the shell gives me an error:

  zsh: no matches found: /(.*)/

So, I tried typing:

  cpan upgrade '/(.*)/'

Which at least kept my shell from trying to expand the last argument, but cpan complained:

  Warning: Cannot install upgrade, don't know what it is.
  Try the command

    i /upgrade/

  to find objects with matching identifiers.
  Sorry, install with a regular expression is only supported when unambiguous.
  Rejecting argument '/(.*)/'

So, instead at the shell I just typed:

  cpan

Then, at the cpan[1]> prompt, I typed:

  upgrade

That seemed to work.

Sorry meant the CPAN shell. Should have reproduced the prompt better. Also it does appear that the regex isn't required any longer. That's certainly nice.

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