At a risk of sounding really stupid, I need to ask a basic question. I have Fedora Core 2 installed on a machine. It was installed from a DVD and all the available packages were installed. Now, I need to "update" my perl package to include some different modules. I am trying to incorporate SPF into Sendmail and I need some of the modules that weren't installed. Do I have to uninstall Perl and then re-install? Or is there a way to rebuild Perl and include all of the packages that I need? Now if I have to uninstall, do I use the rpm -u command or is there a better way to do it? Thanks in advance!

"At a risk of sounding really stupid, I need to ask a basic question. I have Fedora Core 2 installed on a machine. It was installed from a DVD and all the available packages were installed. Now, I need to "update" my perl package to include some different modules. I am trying to incorporate SPF into Sendmail and I need some of the modules that weren't installed. Do I have to uninstall Perl and then re-install? Or is there a way to rebuild Perl and include all of the packages that I need? Now if I have to uninstall, do I use the rpm -u command or is there a better way to do it? Thanks in advance!"

"I am trying to incorporate SPF into Sendmail"

rpm -i
installs a package

"Do I have to uninstall Perl and then re-install? Or is there a way to rebuild Perl and include all of the packages that I need? "

rpm -U
upgrades a package

"Now if I have to uninstall, do I use the rpm -u command or is there a better way to do it?"
rpm -e removes a package

See:
man rpm

-----------------------
Steve Stites

I got from the help file that -U updates, but how do I go about rebuilding Perl to include the needed modules?

By the way. thanks for your help. But I just discovered yet another question. When I type
"rpm -qa | grep perl" I get a list of about 50 packages. Which is the real "perl"?

You might have perl modules in the list you get? Did you even take time to look at it?

Well, as a matter of fact I did thank you mrcheeks. If I wanted a snide answer I would go to one of the other forums. I came here because I want to learn how to do this. And no I didn't see any of the modules listed that I need.

It would be nice if someone would actually answer my question; I will restate it. If I need to add these modules(which I really don't know if it was compiled with them or not) how does one go about doing that. I guess the first question would to be to determine if perl has any of these modules. I am speciffically looking for:

Posix
Sendmail::Milter
Socket
Net::CIDR
Mail::SPF::Query
Mail::SRS
Getopt
Errno

When I tried and installing the SPF milter to go with sendmail, it came back and said that it needed these modules so I would assume they weren't there. So how do I get them installed?

you can use yum extender to search and install theses packages or use the poor add/remove packages applications of fedora.

Hi ScooterB. I've had a look on synaptic, apt-gets GUI on FC2, and even though there are lots of perl modules, some installed, the ones you are looking for arn't there. I've also got Webmin, available from http://www.webmin.com . Webmin has afacility for downloading and installing perl modules from cpan, which is the site for perl, and it's modules. I tried errno ans this installed ok using webmin. I'm not sure where it's put it, and am not sure how perl deals with it's loaded modules, but webmin said it was installed. Be carefull if you decide to use webmin, as some of the modules you want seem to have different versions, "Getopt" for instance. You can view, and get, available modules also direct from cpan. http://search.cpan.org . And the main page is, http://www.cpan.org . Webmin is easier as you don't have to install the tar.gz files manually. Webmin is easy to install, and if you decide to use it (and it does loads of other stuff too) get the file named "webmin-1-240-1.noarch.rpm" , Install instructions are on the same page as the downloads. You login to it through your webbrowser, using root, and your root password. You will be told during the install, what the URL is. All the best. Nigel.aka farpoint

Thanks a bunch. I have used Webmin some but not for things like this. I really wasn't aware that Webmin would perform actions like this. I will definitely take a look at using it. Thanks for your help!

That worked relatively painless. I got all but two of them instlled thru webmin. Now, for my next question; The documentation for SPF says that I need to make sure that my perl is "thread-enabled (compiled with duseithreads)". How do I find out if it is? And I guess the second part is how do I find out if it was compiled with duseithreads? I googled for an answer and looked at the cpan/perl sites, but they refer to mostly actually working with the perl programming language itself. How do I go about finding out how it was compiled? Thanks!

Hi. Glad you got most of the modules installed. When I saw your initial post, I knew that Webmin could install perl modules and offered the help. I don't know much more about perl, but see there is a mailing list at http://www.cpan.org, and am sure that someone there can help . Sorry that I can't help more, and am genuinally sorry. I've only been working with computers since July 2003, mainly Linux , so am not too clued up on a lot of stuff. Nigel.aka farpoint.

Thanks farpoint. I've used webmin for a quick way to look at logs and administer users, but haven't really had the time to explore all of it's uses. Seems like a pretty good tool from what I've seen in the past. I was checking out cpan yesterday and found quite a bit there. I just need to find out now if my distro copy of perl was compiled with duseithreads. Whatever those are??!