Elliot Loves Perl

pmtools is a set of little utilities for dealing with your installed modules. (Unfortunately, if you want to install these using CPAN.pm or CPANPLUS, you need to tell them to install “Devel::Loaded”.)

The ones that I use on a daily basis are pmpath, pmvers, and pminst.

I use pminst and pmvers to maintain a couple of DarkPANs, a.k.a. internal CPANs. I want to manage the versions of modules we use so that we don’t get surprises, like they won’t compile in our environment or they make changes that we can’t deal with right away. So, we have repositories in the standard CPAN layout and point CPAN(PLUS)? to those instead of the public CPAN.

Since the install tools are pointed at an internal repository, when I want to use a module that we haven’t used before, I need to download the distribution myself. It’s not as simple as just grabbing the distribution archive. I need to get the module’s dependencencies. In order to find out which of those I’ve already gets installed, I use pminst.

If I run into a problem with a module, I need to figure out which version I’ve got in order to look at whether there’s an updated version or to properly report a bug. Thus, pmvers.

I regularly need to figure out what path I’m getting a module from, for example whether it’s in the core perl install or in my installed modules path. (In order to avoid cross-project module version entanglements, we don’t use sitelibs; we use separate install directories. The core perl installation is readonly and nothing ever gets added to it.) pmpath probably gets the most usage of the three.

The most common of my use of pmpath isn’t actually direct. When I get an exception in some module, I want to bring it up in the editor to see the code. I’ve created a script that I call pmedit: