install script should install *all* dependencies

i see no reason why the install script doesn't install perl (and anything else that is required) rather than requiring the user to do that. the whole point of the script is to install all the appropriate pieces so the user doesn't have to, isn't it? :-)

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Howdy -- yeah the minimal CentOS install no longer includes Perl, and the installer doesn't automatically correct that.

I've just added Perl as a dependency to the installer, that will be handled in the next version.

it looks like perl can be invoked to determine os type, so is just adding it to dependencies going to be enough?

Ah yes, the oschooser.pl is indeed run prior to the package/dependency installations.

I think I see why that may not have been changed previously, as the solution there isn't simple. Since the installer doesn't yet know the OS/version, it also doesn't know how to install packages.

I'll add that to the todo list of things to look into; what I'll do for the moment is push in a change that looks for Perl, and if it's not there, it'll gracefully exit and request that Perl be installed before running the installer.

it already does spit out a message and ask for perl to be installed. i haven't looked at it hard enough to know if perl only gets used if the os is not readily determined, which would make this easier.

Joe's picture
Submitted by Joe on Sat, 01/10/2015 - 03:18 Pro Licensee

The OS is never "readily determined". ;-)

The code in oschooser and in os-list.txt is crazy complicated. We support too many systems to make it easy; it would take even more code in sh to accurately detect all the systems we're supporting.

It would be possible to check for yum and apt-get and try to install Perl before knowing enough to install the other stuff. I suspect we can count on the perl package to be called simply "perl" on the big Linux distros, anyway (this won't work on FreeBSD or some of the other less popular systems).

I'm surprised Perl is no longer a standard OS package. That's disappointing. I remember when Ubuntu dropped it, but I thought they were just being weird, as they often are.