Issues installing Perl modules manually

I'm trying to install the DateTime module on my system. I'm using this guide.

First up I just used wget to download, untarred, did a perl Makefile.pm, and then make

I then ran in to problems with dependencies and saw I could use CPAN instead.

Running install DateTime in cpan seemed to work, and if I try to install it again I get DateTime is up to date (1.51).

The issue though is that now when I try to run my script I get Can't locate namespace/autoclean.pm in @INC, and trying to install that via cpan results in failures like: Warning: no success downloading '/root/.cpan/sources/authors/id/n/n/n/na/namespace/autoclean.pm.tmp28533'. Giving up on it. at /usr/share/perl5/CPAN/Distribution.pm line 379

Is there something I'm missing? Did I screw up my install by trying to install Datetime via wget instead of cpan?

Solution

You didn't show what command you issued, but it wasn't correct.^[1] cpan was trying to download

authors/id/n/n/n/na/namespace/autoclean.pm

(autoclean.pm by CPAN author "namespace".)

The correct file is

authors/id/E/ET/ETHER/namespace-autoclean-0.29.tar.gz

(namespace-autoclean-0.29.tar.gz by CPAN author "ETHER".)

The correct shell command is

cpan namespace::autoclean

From within the cpan interactive interface, the correct command is

install namespace::autoclean

I think you did the equivalent of
```
cpan namespace/autoclean.pm
```
When you provide a path, it's expected to be a path to a distribution, including the author ID. For example, you could use the following to install a specific version of the distribution:
```
cpan ETHER/namespace-autoclean-0.29.tar.gz
```
Note that newer versions of cpan first check if the path corresponds to a known module, so cpan namespace/autoclean.pm would actually have worked for newer versions of cpan.