# Perl CPAN vs ports



## Business_Woman (Dec 16, 2012)

Hi,

I have a couple of perl modules installed and was wondering how to best keep them up to date.
Regular ports have FreeBSD specific patch files, is this also true for perl? I.e Is there any reason to choose ports over cpan, or vice versa?

So far I have been using cpan to keep p5- modules up to date, is there anything like the refuse directive from cvs, in svn? To keep portmaster from complaining about p5-* ?


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## wblock@ (Dec 16, 2012)

Stick with ports whenever possible.  They might have custom patches for FreeBSD, and the dependencies will be tracked.

Both cvs and svn are source control systems.  Changing the files they download will not affect portmaster.  I don't know if there is a way to tell portmaster to ignore a certain batch of ports, but doing so is asking for trouble anyway.


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## qsecofr (Dec 16, 2012)

> I don't know if there is a way to tell portmaster to ignore a certain batch of ports



Maybe the exclude flag would help with that?

```
portmaster -x
```


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## cpm@ (Dec 16, 2012)

If you only wanted to update those p5-* ports that need to be updated, but not other ports that need to be updated, you could use something like: 
`# portmaster `pkg_version -vIL= | awk '/^p5-/ { print $1 }'``

Maybe you want read about this good suggestion from source posted by Doug Barton :e


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## gkontos (Dec 17, 2012)

Better stick with ports unless you need some exotic module which has not been ported to FreeBSD yet.

The beauty of ports is that you have full control of what you install and how to upgrade it.


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## wblock@ (Dec 17, 2012)

And if you do need a module that has not been ported, consider porting it yourself.  It's often not too difficult.


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