[Koha] to cpan or not

[Lars Wirzenius]

On Thu, 2010-03-18 at 11:17 -0400, John Simonds wrote:
> With repect to installing dependencies, how does one know which Perl
> dependencies ARE available and when do we rely on CPAN to replace
> them?
> Is the "package maintainer" the original Koha download and if so, how
> do we know what packages are missing?

Here is what I did:

* The INSTALL.debian-lenny file lists some of the dependencies as Debian
packages, and I installed those.

* During the installation, if I noticed some CPAN package missing, I
would first try to install it from a Debian package. If the CPAN package
is Foo::Bar::BitTwiddle, the corresponding Debian package is
libfoo-bar-bitwiddle-perl.

* If the Debian package does not exist (the CPAN package is not packaged
for Debian), I would install it with the cpan command in Debian.

I got Koha running, but I do not know if my procedure was the ideal one.

It would be excellent to help Debian get packages for all the stuff from
CPAN that Koha needs. I hope to work on that a bit in the near future.