Bug#632830: #632830: dh-make-perl: Should configure away /root/.cpan

[Damyan Ivanov]

tags 632830 help
thanks

-=| Nicholas Bamber, Wed, Jul 06, 2011 at 10:38:31AM +0100 |=-
> After I upgraded dh-make-perl it tried to download the CPAN tarballs 
> to somewhere below /root/.cpan . To continue working I cleaned out 
> /root/.cpan and made it universally writeable but I do not believe 
> this is correct. It should be possible to make a temporary directoy 
> and use that and to do something sensible with the CPAN config to 
> facilitate this.

I had this experience too. However, it is not an outright bug in 
dh-make-perl 0.73. Thing is, dh-make-perl before version 0.73 did 
force CPAN.pm to use a directory under ~/.cpan for downloading. This 
broke with newer CPAN and is a bad thing to do anyway. dh-make-perl 
0.73 dropped that practice, but the ill effect from pre-0.73 versions 
stays, probably the modification made to CPAN config is permanent. 
Maybe when run under fakeroot or sudo CPAN.pm stored a bad value for 
$ENV{HOME} (/root).

I am not sure how to fix legacy situation, but for new users 0.73 
should work just fine.

As a workaround, you may try to wipe out CPAN configuration from 
~/.cpan and ~/.local/share/.cpan and then re-configure CPAN. This is 
what I did and it worked. It is ugly though and help in narrowing the 
badly made configuration is warmly welcomed! The important change is 
in revision 76463 (76464 helps too making tarball retrieval work with 
standard CPAN configuration).