> I had no idea why. ... Sorry I sounded cranky, truthfully I'm probbly just unfamiliar.
Yes. CPAN does a lot to help the user and gives a lot of information, but all that information truly does contain 99% of what you need.
It progresses in phases (prep, make, test, install) just like most other make-based software (99% of the stuff installed on your linux boxes) and after each phase it will say "<phase> OK"/"<phase> NOT OK", so you only have to read for that, then scan upwards to see what errors you got from gcc or whatever. In other words, and i'm not trying to be mean, but: You only have to read what is on your screen.
As for "Gems, composer, npm, rpm", i know that the three non-npm ones don't run tests on install (npm probably doesn't either), so you might be conflating "flawless and easily" with "system incompatibilities are found at runtime, instead of install time". I.e. it's highly likely that what you like of them isn't that they've progressed beyond CPAN.pm, but that they've yet to catch up to it.
Ah, that wasn't clear.
I have to say though:
> I had no idea why. ... Sorry I sounded cranky, truthfully I'm probbly just unfamiliar.
Yes. CPAN does a lot to help the user and gives a lot of information, but all that information truly does contain 99% of what you need.
It progresses in phases (prep, make, test, install) just like most other make-based software (99% of the stuff installed on your linux boxes) and after each phase it will say "<phase> OK"/"<phase> NOT OK", so you only have to read for that, then scan upwards to see what errors you got from gcc or whatever. In other words, and i'm not trying to be mean, but: You only have to read what is on your screen.
As for "Gems, composer, npm, rpm", i know that the three non-npm ones don't run tests on install (npm probably doesn't either), so you might be conflating "flawless and easily" with "system incompatibilities are found at runtime, instead of install time". I.e. it's highly likely that what you like of them isn't that they've progressed beyond CPAN.pm, but that they've yet to catch up to it.