Were There Precursors to CPAN?

Question

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?

thesuperbigfrog · Accepted Answer

CPAN's name directly comes from CTAN, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network:http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/H/HF/HFB/grok-cpan-1.01.pdfCTAN: https://www.ctan.org/

rurban · Answer

And it wasn't Larry. It was Andreas Koenig with Jarkko Hietaniemi.