[MacPerl] cpan-mac issue: "Could not gzopen" resolved

[Charles Albrecht <cwa2@cornell.edu>]

I've seen this mentioned about a half dozen times in the archives 
and never seen anybody say "yes, this suggestion fixed the problem"
It's vexed me for at least year, in which cpan-mac was completely 
unusable for me, a novelty. Tonight, I finally tracked down what 
was causing the problem and it turned out to be much simpler than 
anything I had considered up to that point. Hopefully this will 
assist anyone else struggling with the issue.

The problem: 
cpan-mac always failed in the TIEHANDLE sub when attempting to 
gzopen a file. $! contained "No such file or directory" (I 
edited CPAN.pm to include $1 in the error message.)

My setup: 
Mac OS 8.6, PB G3/300, MacPerl and site_perl were on an HFS+ 
partition. MacPerl was allocated different memory parititions 
to test, from 50-100MB, usually around 80MB, same result with 
all partition sizes.

A typical session (with a .tgz that had already been downloaded) 
would look something like this using CPAN-shell in cpan-mac 0.40:

| cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation (v1.52)
| ReadLine support available (try ``install Bundle::CPAN'')
| 
| cpan> install CNANDOR/Data-Dumper-2.101-bin-1-Mac.tgz
| Going to read :cpan:sources:authors:01mailrc.txt.gz
| CPAN: Compress::Zlib loaded ok
| Going to read :cpan:sources:modules:02packages.details.txt.gz
| Scanning cache :cpan:build for sizes
| Going to read :cpan:sources:modules:03modlist.data.gz
| Running make for CNANDOR/Data-Dumper-2.101-bin-1-Mac.tgz
| CPAN: MD5 loaded ok
| # Could not gzopen :cpan:sources:authors:id:CNANDOR:Data-Dumper-2.101-bin-1-Mac.tgz   No such file or directory.
| File 'Wail:Applications:Perl:MacPerl:site_perl:CPAN.pm'; Line 4374


It turns out in retrospect that "No such file or directory" was helpful.
I had specified relative paths for the cpan_home directory when I 
first installed. When TIEHANDLE is called in that instance, the 
current directory is not cpan's parent, but the build directory 
:cpan:build in my case. 

When CPAN attempted to gzopen the file, then, it was looking in
:cpan:build:cpan:sources:authors:... and couldn't find the file, because 
it was looking in the wrong place.

Once I edited :site_perl:CPAN:Config.pm to use absolute pathnames, 
the problem went away. A quick scan through the archives shows that 
others who have reported this problem were also using relative 
pathnames to specify their cpan_home directory.

-Charles Albrecht
 cwa2@cornell.edu

~~
Charles Albrecht                                      P.O. Box 100194
cwa2@cornell.edu                                     Denver, Colorado
C>303.619.7596  F>978.334.3061                             80250-0194



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