The docs for perlbrew explain what needs to be done very clearly, but I'll shorten it up here for you anyway.

1. If you've had local::lib installed earlier, delete (rm -fr) ~/perl5 and ~/.cpan. You might want to backup ~/.cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm first.

2. Remove the setting of local::lib variables in .cshrc, .bash_profile or equalient files. For me I commented out this line in my .bash_profile, so it looks like this:

3. Close all terminal windows and restart terminal. In a new window execute these commands:

Now thats better. Since Perl is now in your home directory with all its environment vars set correctly, you will not need to install local::lib. Just put your old MyConfig.pm back into ~/.cpan/CPAN, and execute cpan -i App::cpanminus to get one step closer to complete recovery.

This year's snowboard trip went to Schladming in Austria. Allthough it was a bit late in the season the conditions in the slopes were quite good. Especially after noon when the sun had heated the snow into soft sugar. We had one whole day in the park, and that single day was worth the whole trip alone. There wasn't much photographing on this trip, but above is a shot taken with my cell phone from the top of the park in Planai.

Modern languages like Ruby, Java and Python all have different methods to let the user install libraries in the users home folder (or everywhere where the user has write access). Java have jar-files which is very easy to put whereever the users wants as long as its location is added to the classpath. Ruby gems also installs nicely under the running user's home directory when gem is run as a non-privileged user. Out of the box. Its is nice to have different library directories for different users. It makes them independent in the case of an upgrade or a new deployment. Every application should for security reasons be run as seperate user anyway, and of course never as root. 

Unfortunately the newer ways of installing Perl modules is, as far as I could find, not documented in the official documentation of the Perl packages in the different distributions. The tools required is not installed by default either. Lets just cut to the chase: by installing the Perl modules local::lib combined with the more easy to use cpan-minus (App::cpanminus) installing og keeping your Perl modules updated will be as easy (or at least very closely) as using apt on Ubuntu. The method is also very useful if you want to install Perl modules on a system where you don't have root privileges. Lets walk through the setup.

The installation is quite similar for every Unix-like operatin system. including FreeBSD, OS X, Solaris and Linux. You will, of course, need Perl installed, but apart from that keep as few as possible Perl modules installed in the base site_perl library.

As your user (here user test) logged in to the system (development), fetch (or wget if you use Linux) and install local::lib:

CPAN will ask you some question but hopefully answer most of them itself. Just press enter on most of them, or correct the settings that seems obviously wrong.

If everything is ok, install it.

Then you need to set some environment variables to be loaded when your user log in. Simply execute this if you are using tcsh:

If you are using bash instead of tcsh, execute this:

Now, to set them vars, simply log out and in, and check that they are set correctly (these three below need to be present):

Next, configure cpan to install dependencies automatically and to download the modules from a nearby mirror:

Install App::cpanminus:

After some minutes with compiling and installing, the cpanminus will hopefully be installed. It is shipped with a executable 'cpanm' that is placed in your path. Type rehash to reload the path if you're using csh/tcsh.

Lets try to install a small module, take YAML for example (CPAN will complain if its not there, so its good to get it in anyway):

Now thats better! If you want do to something more complicated with a lot of module dependencies, try installing the nice Catalyst framework:

If you want to upgrade a perl module, just run cpanm <module>, and cpanm will upgrade it if there is a new version available in CPAN. 

Portmaster is a shell script written by Doug Barton which will make your port management far more pleasent. Since it's made for FreeBSD you will find it in ports (/usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portmaster).

To install a port (I assume you have sudo installed):

sudo portmaster -D x11/gnome2

The -D tells portmaster to delete them files in /usr/ports/distfiles when it is finished with them.

Portmaster will now traverse through all the dependencies that the port depends on, and let you configure all of them before it starts any compiling. By doing do, the installation will, in most cases, be able to do the whole compile process and install everything unattended. Thats nice because you can just detach the whole thing in a screen and, in the meanwhile, focus on something else.

At first, I only started using portmaster for keeping my installed ports up to date. To upgrade a port, ImageMagick for instance, with all its new, required, dependencies after you updated your ports-tree, you execute this:

sudo portmaster ImageMagick-nox11

If you want to upgrade all your ports, simply execute:

sudo portmaster -a

Portmaster will automaticly take a backup of all the existing ports that will be upgraded. Often, in non-production environments (your desktop), you can add the -B option to prevent it from doing so to make it go a little faster.

sudo portmaster -DBa

or

sudo portmaster -DB ImageMagick-nox11

To get a list of all the installed ports and show wether they are depended on or have dependencies:

portmaster -L

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