[TriLUG] Request Tracker and perl dependency nightmare

[James Olin Oden]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 9:25 AM, David McDowell <turnpike420 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm running CentOS 4.x and intend to get Request Tracker up and
>  running.  About 2-3 years ago I found a place that had a repo setup
>  for RPMs of RT, including all the perl packages so that installing
>  this beast wasn't such a nightmare.  That sight has disappeared.  RT
>  has certainly grown since then as well, but even today, someone like
>  Dag doesn't even appear to attempt the daunting task of having a repo
>  work easily for RT installation.  Any tips or does someone know a
>  secret location for the latest RPMs with the perl deps all figured
>  out?  If not that, any tips on figuring out all the perl deps?  Please
>  note that I'm not knowledgable in the world of perl...
>
Its likely not as bad as you think, though, annoying yes.   Basically,
the request tracker guy probably lists his top level perl module
dependencies.  You can start from there, but if say you wanted to
create the set of packages that might go in a repo, do this:

    1) Get on a "scratch" machine with a clean install of CentOS of
your choice.
    2) Download the pre-req perl modules from www.cpan.org that is
specified in the request tracker docs (download them one by one).
    3) Build each one, but as you do the initial: perl Makefile.pl,
your going to have some say, hey I require this, so download these;
rinse, lather repeat.
    4) As you build things successfully without it asking for any deps
install these with "make install".   That way the thing that depended
on it will see that
        its there now (its like checking things  off a list).
    5) Now that you have the complete set of tarballs, use a program
like cpanflute2 (found in RPM::Specfile cpan module) to turn these
tarballs into rpms.   Since the system
         your on now has all the deps installed, order is not
important (this a hackish way to do a build environment, but hey it
works).

voila, you now have transversed dep hell and lived to tell about it,
and you have your own little set of packages you can share with
others.

Good Luck...james

P.S.  Long long ago I wrote a competting program to Request
Tracker...he won if only because I lost intrests (it was Tech
Tracker).  It essentially had the same dep hell issue that request
tracker seems to have.

P.S.S. You can likely use the CPAN module to download all the deps,
but I prefer to go through the process manually so I know what the
deps are....though I'm really not sure if there is any value in that
knowledge.
>