Shlomi Fish

Mageia Linux is an RPM-based Linux distribution, whose repositories contain over 3,000 CPAN packages, and part of the reason why it has so many is because Jerome Quelin and the other maintainers have worked on tools to facilitate creating Mageia packages for CPAN distributions and maintaining them.

However, I was a little confused about using magpie, so I'd like to share my findings here:

1. In order to import, upload and submit a new CPAN package into Mageia, along with all of its dependencies, one should not use magpie, but rather cpan2pkg. Its use is very simple: make rpm and urpmi sudoable, and type cpan2pkg Package::Name from the command-line inside an X terminal. This will start a Tk window where one can monitor the progress of preparing new RPM packages and it has an entry box to create more packages (which saves time on re-initialising CPAN.pm or CPANPLUS.pm).

2. In order to upgrade a package, one can type eval $( magpie co -s perl-[PACKAGE_NAME] ) and then magpie update. magpie requires minicpan to be installed and updated.

3. In order to install packages, one can do sudo urpmi 'perl(Package::Name)'. My Module-Format module facilitates the translation from other notations for writing modules:

   up()
   {
       sudo urpmi --auto $(perlmf as_rpm_colon "$@")
   }