Why aren't the actual module names in the package descript..

(This post is about an issue I've seen with other Debian Perl
packages, but uses libmailtools-perl as an example.)

Last week I needed Mail::Mailer on a Debian Woody machine, and
wanted to use apt-get to install it.

Trying:
apt-cache search perl | grep -i mailer

returns nothing (on Woody *or* Sarge).

After some searching and guessing, I eventually discovered
that the package I wanted to install is libmailtools-perl.

I tried:
apt-cache show libmailtools-perl

But found no mention of which Perl modules this package
contains. The description merely says:

| Description: Manipulate email in perl programs
| This is a set of perl modules which provide an easy interface to
| manipulating email in an object-oriented fashion.

The way I guessed that this might be the right package was
by searching CPAN, which pointed me to:
http://search.cpan.org/~markov/MailTools-1.67/Mail/Mailer.pm
(then noticed the name "MailTools" there).

So my questions to this list are:

1. Why doesn't the "apt-cache show" description usually list the
module names? (I see that it *is* properly listed for, say, the
libtext-template-perl package.)

2. Given that you know the module you'd like to install, how, in-
general, can you get apt-cache to tell you which package to install?

3. (though this might be off-topic here) Why does CPAN use that
"MailTools" name? Why is it grouping those Mail::* modules that
way?

It seems to me that it should be standard practice to list in a
Perl package's description exactly which modules it is supplying.





__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


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On Sat, 12 Nov 2005, John M. Gabriele wrote:
> Last week I needed Mail::Mailer on a Debian Woody machine, and
> wanted to use apt-get to install it.
>
> apt-cache search perl | grep -i mailer
>
> returns nothing (on Woody *or* Sarge).

This is the wrong way to search for specific modules, unfortunatly.

Do this instead:

aptitude install apt-file; apt-file update; apt-file search Mail/Mailer;

or:

visit packages.debian.org and search by package contents.

> 1. Why doesn't the "apt-cache show" description usually list the
> module names? (I see that it *is* properly listed for, say, the
> libtext-template-perl package.)

Developers have in certain instances, but some packages contain
thousands of modules:

$ dpkg -L libmail-box-perl|grep '.pm$'|wc -l
117

FE. [Which is probably the module you really want to use if you wrote
this perl code.]

> 3. (though this might be off-topic here) Why does CPAN use that
> "MailTools" name? Why is it grouping those Mail::* modules that way?

Because that's what the author calls the package.

> It seems to me that it should be standard practice to list in a Perl
> package's description exactly which modules it is supplying.

For smaller sets of modules, yes. But in some of the larger cases, it
can't be done sanely. That's what apt-file and packages.debian.org is
for.


Don Armstrong

--
Identical parts aren't.
-- Beach's Law

http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu


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