On my media server, I wanted to set up Perl’s CPAN but when I ran install Bundle::CPAN, I ctrl-c’d out of it when I noticed that bzip2 wasn’t installed. Silly me. Soon after I started receiving:
Can’t call method “value” on an undefined value at /usr/share/perl5/IO/Uncompress/RawInflate.pm
Reinstalling Perl and all the related ubuntu packages doesn’t fix it, nor does removing the ~root/.cpan dir. There is an easy workaround though.
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states… Done
Building tag database… Done
The following packages are BROKEN:
libio-compress-zlib-perl
The following packages have been kept back:
bind9-host dnsutils libbind9-30 libisccfg30
The following packages will be REMOVED:
libcompress-raw-zlib-perl
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 4 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 319kB will be freed.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libio-compress-zlib-perl: Depends: libcompress-raw-zlib-perl (>= 2.008) but it is not installable
Resolving dependencies…
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:
Remove the following packages:
apparmor-utils
libcompress-zlib-perl
libio-compress-zlib-perl
libmp3-tag-perl
librpc-xml-perl
libwww-perl
libxml-parser-perl
ubuntu-standard
Score is 592
Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?]
Make a note of the packages that it will remove, then tell it to go ahead. It will remove these packages!
Start cpan, and type in
. When it is complete, reinstall the ubuntu packages that you removed earlier (for example):
That’s it. Your cpan is working again 
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Hi,
Googled the same problem and came to your website. I followed your instructions, but I still get the same error… do you have any followups? I’m trying to install WWW::Mechanize.
Thanks,
Matt
Hi Matt,
I haven’t run across the problem where the procedure above doesn’t work. You may want to ask on Perlmonks. They usually have the answers right away.
Jason
I ran an “install Bundle::CPAN” without first doing “apt-get install
build-essentials”, and that was a mistake. Many things didn’t build
fully, and CPAN wedged itself into a state where RawInflate.pm was
broken and nothing could be done. Make sure you run “apt-get install
build-essentials” first. It would be nice if CPAN would know this
somehow so that it didn’t let you fail and wedge itself.
Running “apt-get remove libcompress-raw-zlib-perl” got CPAN un-wedged and
allowed “install Bundle::CPAN” to complete; but, when I did “apt-get
install spamassassin”, it brought back the broken old version of
RawInflate.pm and CPAN was broken again! Looks like the Ubuntu package
for the compress library is too old for the current CPAN, and of course
CPAN and APT don’t share version information and get along nicely.
I managed to do something like “force install Bundle::CPAN” (or maybe
it was a force install of Zlib) to over-ride the broken RawInflate
and get CPAN working again. So Ubuntu APT thinks I have the “old”
libcompress-raw-zlib-perl installed and CPAN knows we have the new stuff.
SpamAssassin’s sa-update -D shows things are working.
Oh thank you so much, this worked wondefuly! Life without CPAN is no life at all, …
Removing RawInflate.pm fixed this for me. Then install Bundle::CPAN and I was good. nothing else from any other posts worked.