Item660: "Running from configure, disabling CPAN" message needs clarification/fix

While documenting/closing Item655, I saw that the message Running from configure, disabling CPAN apparently doesn't mean that no installation of missing CPAN modules takes place, cf. this log: dbcacheplugin-configure.txt.

In order to reproduce this, you'll need a trunk-based pseudo-install (or at least beta3 with the fix that aliases &TWiki::Extender::install) and explicitely set up CPAN for the "CGI user" (e.g., apache/httpd), so it's not a common error. In the latter case, however, the message shouldn't be displayed -- arguably, it shouldn't be displayed at all but substituted with a message which gets displayed if and only if it is explicitely desired to install the modules automatically (Lavr: "won't confuse the users").

(Curiously, I couldn't find the message using grep -ir "disabling CPAN" in my working directory...)

-- .MarkusUeberall

I don't even know what the heck its doing, so i'm setting this to waiting on Crawford

The idea that a web cgi script might have enough priv to install CPAN libs is not just unlikely, its downright dangerous.

-- SvenDowideit - 08 Feb 2009

I have no idea. The message is generated on line 77 of extender.pl, in some code Olivier added, so setting waiting for his feedback.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 22 Feb 2009

The idea was in fact to disable CPAN when running from configure, so that it won't even try to automatically install CPAN dependencies from configure. There are like 1 chance in 100 that CPAN will work from the webserver user.

It's true that it won't be disabled when installing extension dependencies, which is what's happening there.

It was done because the CPAN error generated by configure were confusing the users.

I agree we need to make configure more user friendly, so feel free to submit any improvement.

-- OlivierRaginel - 22 Feb 2009

This has been mostly resolved by the refactoring done by creating Package.pm. Checking in one additional change to EXTEND.pm to further clarify how dependencies are resolved.

-- GeorgeClark - 09 Apr 2010