[CLUG] Perl nightmares

[Peter Flynn]

I'm trying to kick httpmail into action, which claims to be able to
download HotMail mail into a standard mailbox. Unfortunately it's
written in Perl, Java, Ruby, and VB -- all of which are completely
undocumented, and none of which I use.

Perl is the one I feel closest to, so I want to try that, but it
appears to need thousands of add-ons before it will run (I have
stock 5.6.1 from the RH 7.2 distro). I'm getting messages like

    Can't locate object method "requests_redirectable" via
    package "RequestAgent" (perhaps you forgot to load
    "RequestAgent"?) at Mail/HTTPMailClient.pm line 30.

but every attempt to go find these package at CPAN brings more
and more dependencies, all of which fail. There's something called
a "bundle" which appears to be an undocumented facility for bulk
downloading and installing several packages at a time, but the
commands suggested ("perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::LWP'") fail
with ludicrously useless error messages like

    lynx: Can't access startfile

and

    Warning: expected file
    [/root/.cpan/sources/authors/id/G/GB/GBARR/libnet-1.11.tar.gz]
    doesn't exist

and complete and utter nonsenses like

    Looking up ftp.perl.org
    ftp.perl.org
    Unable to locate remote host ftp.perl.org.
    Alert!: Unable to connect to FTP host.

(note ftp.perl.org is perfectly contactable at the time I copied
and pasted this, so whatever software is claiming to retrieve the
bundle is clearly up a duck's ass).

Has anyone out there any clue as to how to get packages for Perl
downloaded and installed? There used to be a very neat facility which
involved unwrapping a tar.gz file, running perl makefile.PL, and then
doing a make; make install which used to work perfectly once you got
the hang of the undocumented dependencies. Bundles seem to have
replaced this with a Nazi technique of forcing the user to download
several Gb of source and rebuilding the entire system just to add a
plugin. Is there any way around this?

///Peter