[cobalt-users] Interchange

["Carrie Bartkowiak" <admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I just tried to install Interchange (used to be MiniVend) on my RaQ4i.
Egads, batman.
You flip the tarball over, untar it, and start the configure with a simple,
innocent-looking ./configure.
It doesn't tell you what it does then.

That thing connected to cpan sites and downloaded every make and module for
Perl5.6 in existence. TONS of stuff. It just kept going and going. (The
Energizer Install.) I sat through a complete install of Perl5.6, afraid to
stop it because it might break something and afraid to let it go on because
it might break something. I accepted all of the defaults and the suggestions
it offered me.
At one point, it ran out of memory and we sat there waiting for a few
minutes for some memory to free up (I have 128MB of RAM).
It did all kinds of things, most of which I did not understand. I was trying
to keep up reading but the stuff kept scrolling off of my telnet window too
fast and I couldn't scroll back far enough to cath important-looking stuff.

I was encouraged because it kept telling me that things "look good" and all
tests were passed with flying colors.
I sat there and *watched* it put in Perl5.6. It even made a new manual
directory and called it man3.
It finally finished (after about an hour) and told me everything was ready,
I could now make a demo store by going to my interchange directory and
typing bin/makecat.
Which I did, and now it's telling me it can't go ahead with that process
because it can't find Vend/MakeCat.pm.
Sigh.
The docs say to issue a slightly different command, bin/makecat construct.
Tried that as well but didn't matter because it still can't find
Vend/MakeCat.pm.
And I can't locate Perl5.6 anywhere on my system. The man3 directory is
still there, but Perl5.6 is nonexistent.

I was trying to install Interchange on one of my domains, *not* the home
domain for the machine. So now, thanks to this script, I have a complete
(and I do mean COMPLETE) /lib directory and all subdirectories in one of my
virtual domains. Including that Vend directory the thing is looking for.

Now I don't know if I can delete all of this crap safely and get it out of
my virtual domain, or if the system is now running using the stuff that it
put into the virtual directory.  It was doing a lot of compiling and making
references to where users normally access things, such as /etc and /lib.

I guess I'm just venting at this point. I'm half tempted to delete all of
that, reboot, and cross my fingers.
How can I check to see if the server is using any of these files to run?

At least nothing is broken so far, even rebooted and came back up nice as
you please with everything working fine.
*grumble grumble*

Carrie Bartkowiak
Administrator, All @bout Choice
admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.allaboutchoice.com