CPAN

Prior to working with Bugzilla, I have never used CPAN, or knew of it’s existence. While installing Bugzilla, I ran into some errors because it was missing some modules. Doing some research, was to install a CPAN library, as Bugzilla uses the CPAN library extensively (my guess is to make Bugzilla portable across multiple platforms). However, it was brought to my attention that it may not be the wisest method to resolve the issue. Due to this information, and being informed that much of it was available through yum, I decided to investigate.

Running /usr/share/bugzilla/checksetup.pl on the Bugzilla server, results in a long listed output, which contains the following lines:

COMMANDS TO INSTALL OPTIONAL MODULES:

GD: yum install "perl(GD)"
Chart: yum install "perl(Chart::Lines)"
Template-GD: yum install "perl(Template::Plugin::GD::Image)"
GDTextUtil: yum install "perl(GD::Text)"
GDGraph: yum install "perl(GD::Graph)"

We can resolve the dependencies by entering the commands listed above, but installing through CPAN may not be desired, but we may want to install the optional modules that rely on these packages. Doing a simple yum search can resolve this. Entering yum search perl | grep "GD" results in:

perl-GD.x86_64 : Perl interface to the GD graphics library
perl-GDGraph3d.noarch : 3D graph generation package for Perl
gdal-perl.x86_64 : Perl modules for the GDAL file format library
perl-GD-Barcode.noarch : Create barcode image with GD
perl-GD-SVG.noarch : GD::SVG enables SVG output from scripts written using GD
perl-GDGraph.noarch : Graph generation package for Perl
perl-GDTextUtil.noarch : Text utilities for use with GD
perl-GD-SecurityImage.noarch : Security image (captcha) generator
perl-Template-GD.noarch : GD plugin(s) for the Template Toolkit

The first package listed resolving the issue listed. We can also see some other packages listed that may resolve some of the other optional requirements. One may want to keep this in mind when installing Bugzilla and wanting to minimize what is installed from CPAN.

-Richard K.