I was trying to write a perl script when i discovered that the module i needed to use was not installed with my copy of Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar (LWP::Simple). I took me quite a bit of poking around to figure out how to install CPAN modules. Eventually, in the terminal, i ran sudo perl -MCPAN -eshell. I then entered the command install Bundle::LWP. I was then presented with a slew of questions that apparently would configure the way the script would interact with CPAN. I read each question but had no idea what it was taling about most of the time and accepted the default responses. A great many lines of wierd characters then flew by. Somewhere in the process, it decided to download and install the latest version of perl (5.8.5). This time it asked me even more questions which i was even less able to decipher. Again i pressed enter as often as possible to accept the default values and hope it doesn't screw anything up. The only thing i had to do was add a \usr\local\bin directory which it was looking for and couldn't find.
As i sit here, two hours after deciding to "quick download LWP," the damn install is still running. Truth is, i haven't a damn clue what it's doing. I don't remember the last time installing something was ever so scary. I'm sure part of the problem is that i'm still not that comfortable on a *nix command prompt. Typically i can do everything i want with the "pretty" part of my OS. I know where Windows applications choose to stick their files and how they work, but i really have no idea where everything is going. It keeps finding new "dependency" packages to download. Every time it asks, it runs a million tests that take forever to complete. Hopefully it will finish up successfully soon.
I hope this stuff gets easier over time.
[Update] I finally got the process to quit the next time it asked me if i wanted to add "these selected modules to the queue." When it got me back to the cpan> prompt, I typed force install Bundle::LWP. It seems with out the "force" open, OS 10.2 will bomb out on some Berkly DB tests it runs which trip up the whole install.