Packing perl modules into RPMs

Yesterday I was tasked with packing up some perl code into RPM. That was the easy part. The hard part was the dependency graph I created for myself. Maybe there's an easy way to tell an RPM that it can get it's files from /usr/share/RPM, but that part eluded me. Instead I decided I should package up my modules into RPMs. Here's a few things that made this task easier. For starters, I had some perl on the machine, so I didn't have to configure cpan. 

1. Install cpanm 

$> perl -MCPAN -e shell
cpan[1]> install App::cpanminus
cpan[1]> exit 

2. Install cpan2rpm. There was a bug in the source. So, I had to fix the file before it would install. I got this <file> 

http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/E/EC/ECALDER/cpan2rpm-2.028.tar.gz

Here's the steps:

$> cd /usr/local/src
$> wget <file>
$> tar -zxf cpan2rpm-2.028.tar.gz
$> cd cpan2rpm-2.028
$> sed -i"" "s|Pod::Text|Pod::PlainText|g" cpan2rpm
$> cd ../ && tar -czf cpan2rpm-2.028.tar.gz cpan2rpm-2.028
$> cpanm ./cpan2rpm-2.028.tar.gz

Cpan2prm is a pretty nice utility. It will run through the paces, creating an rpm and a source rpm. I ran into one issue while building the namespace::clean module. For some reason, the RPM added a _Util.pm file, that it provided, but then created a "Requires: perl(namespace::clean::_Util)" dependency. The solution I used was to extract the source from the source RPM and then modify the spec file to manually add a "Provides" e.g.

provides: perl(ExtUtils::HasCompiler) = 0.014 
provides: perl(namespace::clean) = 0.27

provides: perl(namespace::clean::_Util) = 0.27

Here's how you can extract a source rpm, edit the file and then build using the spec file:

$> cd ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS
$> mkdir perl-namespace-clean && cd perl-namespace-clean
$> rpm2cpio ../perl-namespace-clean-0.27-1.src.rpm|cpio -idmv
$> emacs namespace-clean.spec
$> cp namespace-clean-0.27.tar.gz ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES
$> rpmbuild -ba namespace-clean.spec