I'm the inxi developer, and thought I'd check puppy out in a vm, but to my somewhat surprise, tested in slacko 7.0 and fossapup 9.5, using the package manager search, it appears that Perl Core Modules are not being shipped with Puppy Perl. When I tried to run inxi, which is perl now, I got missing core module errors, so it exits.
In slacko, I tried installing using cpan, just to test, but cpan wasn't installed either. Note that I'd never expect any user to actually use cpan perl install of missing core modules, but I wanted to just check if I could at least get Perl running properly.
Most if not all users who might want to run inxi I believe would give up at this point, but I'm slightly stubborn, and am wondering if there is something missing, I did a search for perl in the package manager in both versions, and nothing remotely resembling perl core modules appeared, though slacko had a lot of separate perl modules, but nothing that looks like the missing full core modules.
Note that when I've asked perlmonks about issues like this, they always correctly tell me to report the bug to the distro, since not including all the core modules is a bug technically in a perl install.
Interestingly, the two types I tested were missing different modules, but in for example fossapup, even the missing module was not present in a search of the package manager for perl, almost no modules appeared, and none of them were the ones that were missing.
I'm not super concerned about this, it was more curiosity, but is this by design? and if so, why? It makes it basically impossible to run standard perl applications, at least not without jumping through a bunch of hoops.
I package inxi for TinyCore, which roughly does this correctly, you have to install perl5 as a dependency, which is fine, but that is the complete real perl 5, including all core modules.
Note that which core modules are missing is not really relevant in this case, since the actual issue is that Perl is shipping in a broken and incomplete state, and does not include perl core modules, nor is there an obvious way to find if the missing core modules are available as a package.
I thought it would be fun to check inxi to see how it's doing on Puppy, but this is a pretty steep barrier to entry in my opinion, so I guess it is fine if it's not really something anyone is interested in or cares about in the project, but to me, this is a bug, and kind of kills Perl in general since if random unpredictable core modules are removed from core perl, it makes it pretty difficult to try to support Puppy.
Note that in recent testing, slackware users were running inxi successfully on slackware 9, and it's explicitly designed to run on anything with perl 5.08 or newer, as long as it's the actual perl distribution, which includes by definition core modules. I'd found this issue a few years back in early phase of testing perl inxi, and just gave up, but I thought I'd revisit once again just to make sure I'm not missing something very obvious.
Ancient debian, for example, from 2008 or so, at one brief point did ship without core modules included in perl default install, but they just had the core modules as a separate single package, which made it easy to resolve that, but that was fixed in the next Debian version. Fedora/redhat also for unknown reasons remove some of the core modules, but inxi works around that issue since they don't remove any of the primary ones required for inxi to run.
Note that this is just something I thought I'd check into one more time, then update the docs to indicate that this would be the only distro known that has this type of issue, but it would be nice to understand what is going on and why, since one of the main reasons to use Perl is because it always works, in any era system after 5.08 (earlier Perl versions get harder to support due to missing or changed features), with the same exact code from back then to today and even to tomorrow, with coming Perl 7.
Anyway, if someone can clarify this, or show how to resolve the issue in a consistent way, I'll update my docs, and if someone considers it a bug like Perl and I do, it would be nice to get that bug fixed, with a complete Perl shipping out of the box, or at least, the missing core modules shipped as a single perl-core-modules package, which would also be a fine solution if iso size is a major factor.
Anyway, thanks for your time reading this, I'll check back once in a while to see if there's some explanation or solution to this issue, otherwise I'lll make a note in the inxi docs and man page that inxi doesn't really run on puppy without many steps, just so it's clear to users. Its' worth noting that this would be the only known instance of inxi not running on something, it runs on termux, various stripped down router firmware things, this is actually the only system I know that inxi doesn't run on out of the box, which is what inxi is designed to do, run on everything made roughly after 2006 that runs the linux kernel, or the BSD kernels with less data. But I've never actually seen any other instance where it just doesn't run out of the box.
I believe perl will exit on the first missing module called at the start of the program, so it's hard to tell how many modules are present or missing, which is why of course perl core modules are supposed to ship with perl. Note that I go to quite extreme lengths to avoid using unnecessary modules, and non core modules are never required for any reason. I also use the absolute minimum number of core modules possible, so if inxi doesn't run on Puppy, I have to assume that most complex perl programs won't run either.