1009639 - checksetup.pl should suggest to use your package manager to install missing Perl modules before suggesting to use install-module.pl

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Bugzilla :: Installation & Upgrading, enhancement)

Description

[Frédéric Buclin]

checksetup.pl currently suggests to use install-module.pl to install missing Perl modules needed by Bugzilla. For security and maintenance reasons, admins should first try to use the package manager (yum, drakrpm, ...) to install them, so that they get automatic security updates provided by their distro. This also means that if they upgrade their OS which has a newer Perl version, they don't get compatibility issues which sometimes happen with some Perl modules.

checksetup.pl doesn't need to be too specific. Simply something of the form:

"First check if your package manager has the specified Perl modules. If you cannot find them or the ones available are too old, use the following command to install them:

 install-module.pl Foo::Bar"


This should address several questions reported to the support mailing-list where some newbies try to install everything with install-module.pl, and we all know that e.g. DBD::* and mod_perl are a pain to install this way, and all distros have them packaged already.

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Even better, we could check distro version and prompt with package names for common distros. (People from less common distros are welcome to submit patches.)

We would need to deal with the case that the distro had a package, but the packaged version was too old. Perhaps we could use a command to check for the package being installed; if the package was installed but the checksetup.pl test still failed, we would assume the packaged version was too old and recommend install-module.pl.

Gerv

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Marking as [good first bug]. This would involve picking a distro (say Ubuntu), working out how to test if you were on Ubuntu, adding the appropriate package name to a new key in the hash which defines the requirements, and then prompting with a sudo apt-get install <list of names> as well as some install-module.pl commands if they were necessary too.

It's not a small bug in coding size, but it's not too complex.

Gerv

Comment 3

[Joel Maher ( :jmaher ) (UTC -8)]

:gerv, I assume this bug is still valid.  Could you add a mentor to this.

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

We've documented the package lists in the install instructions. So actually, this should just be a text fix which tells people to check there.

Gerv

Comment 5

[Dylan Hardison [:dylan] (he/him)]

The right place for this is documentation.

Comment 6

[Emmanuel Seyman]

JFTR, Fedora's Bugzilla package tells people to run: dnf install "perl(FOO)"
to encourage use of the system-provided perl modules.