Creating backdated CPAN repo from autobundle

Hey folks,

First of all, I'm Shawn -- a newcomer to Perl (by virtue of needing to
manage a sizable infastructure that uses it extensively). I'm an NC
native living in Arlington, VA. You'll probably see more posts from me
in the coming months.

I have a machine whose bundle I'd like to use as the reference for
other machines. I would like to use the autobundle from this machine
to create a cpan repo so that my other machines can install identical
modules -- however many of these are backdated versions. I need to
preserve these versions, however, because it's a very sensitive
production environment that I must keep homogenous, and I cannot update
modules without performing regression tests on our application first.

That said, is there any way to create a CPAN repository from an
autobundle, and subsequently use that autobundle on other machines.
The tough part here is getting the appropriate versions of the modules
into the repository, many of which will have to come from backpan.
I've tried creating scripts to parse the autobundle and then find the
appropriate backpan module. I've encountered some trouble with this.
Also, I could rsync the modules dirs but worry about dependency
problems.

Ideas?!

Shawn

Re: Creating backdated CPAN repo from autobundle

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In article <2008012201281716807-shawnlhood@gmailcom>, Shawn Hood
wrote:

> That said, is there any way to create a CPAN repository from an
> autobundle, and subsequently use that autobundle on other machines.

It's easy to create the repository, but right now it's not so easy to
pick out the particular distributions you need.

I've been slowly working on a way to index everything that has ever
been uploaded to CPAN so you could do such a thing (and search for not
only a module name, but a version number too), but I haven't tried it
on all of BackPAN just yet. Right now it's a project that happens after
all of my paid work is done since nobody is paying for this just yet.

I talk about just this problem in the MyCPAN talk: the audio is on
Perlcast:

http://perlcast.com/2007/09/29/making-my-own-cpan/

The slides are on my own website:

http://www252.pair.com/comdog/Talks/MyCPAN-LApm200709.pdf

The Fall 2007 issue of The Perl Review has my article on it (which is
the same thing as the talk, really).

Good luck :)