I had occasion to run CPAN to install some modules today, and I was wondering - were there dependency managers before CPAN that could know what additional dependencies needed to be installed and automate the whole process? I have worked with npm and yum and deb and maven etc, which are kind of comparable, and came later. Did Larry Wall or someone just invent this, or were there precursors?
CPAN's name directly comes from CTAN, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network:<p><a href="http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/H/HF/HFB/grok-cpan-1.01.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/H/HF/HFB/grok-cpan-1.01.pdf</a><p>CTAN: <a href="https://www.ctan.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.ctan.org/</a>