Ubuntu – Trying to install CPAN

On Debian and Ubuntu CPAN (/usr/bin/cpan utility) installs modules into /usr/local/lib/ by default. And debian packages keep their files in /usr/share/perl5/ and /usr/lib/perl5/. So files installed via /usr/bin/cpan won't overwrite files installed via apt.

There's nothing wrong with using system perl, and mixing apt and cpan code will generally work.

You can also choose to package any cpan distribution not available in your apt repositories manually. It's easy with the help of dh-make-perl tool:

dh-make-perl --cpan Some::Module && cd Some-Module* && sudo debi

It's a known and open bug, read here, and I can reproduce this error.

I have copied the following from here, all credits go to @Schwern.

Build.PL is trying to call a function called prompt but it doesn't exist. This is because they recently switched build systems from ExtUtils::MakeMaker (Makefile.PL) to Module::Build (Build.PL) but didn't fully convert the program. I've reported the bug.

Most people don't notice this because the prompting is only necessary if GD can't configure itself. It does this by looking for the gdlib-config program. If that can't be found, or it doesn't work, it will ask you for your gdlib configuration. It's best to let gdlib-config take care of that. Best way to solve this problem is to make sure gdlib-config is somewhere in your PATH and that gdlib-config --all works.

Otherwise replace all the instances of prompt with Module::Build->prompt and it should work.

And here is the problematic code in Build.pl

my $PREFIX = $lib_gd_path;
if( ! defined($lib_gd_path) )
{
  warn "\n";
  $PREFIX = prompt('Where is libgd installed?','/usr/lib');
}

and here

my ($JPEG, $FT, $XPM, $GIF,$ANIMGIF,$UNCLOSEDPOLY,$FONTCONFIG,$PNG,$FTCIRCLE,$VERSION_33);
if( defined($options) )
{
  $JPEG      = $options =~ m/JPEG/i;
  $FT        = $options =~ m/FT|FREETYPE/i;
  $XPM       = $options =~ m/XPM/i;
  $GIF       = $options =~ m/GIF/i;
  $PNG       = $options =~ m/PNG/i;
  $ANIMGIF   = $GIF && $options =~ m/ANIMGIF/i;
  $VERSION_33= $options =~ m/VERSION_33/i;
  $UNCLOSEDPOLY  = $options =~ m/UNCLOSEDPOLY/i;
  $FONTCONFIG  = $options =~ m/FONTCONFIG/i;
  $FTCIRCLE  = $options =~ m/FTCIRCLE/i;
}
else
{
    warn "\nPlease choose the features that match how libgd was built:\n";
    $JPEG    = lc prompt('Build JPEG support?','y') eq 'y';
    $PNG     = lc prompt('Build PNG support?','y') eq 'y';
    $FT      = lc prompt('Build FreeType support?','y') eq 'y';
    $GIF     = lc prompt('Build GIF support?','y') eq 'y';
    $ANIMGIF = $GIF && lc prompt('Build support for animated GIFs?','y') eq 'y';
    $XPM     = $^O !~ /^freebsd|MSWin32$/ && lc prompt('Build XPM support?','y') eq 'y';
}

and so on.