New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Were There Precursors to CPAN?

Ask HN: Were There Precursors to CPAN?
3 by jtotheh | 0 comments on Hacker News.
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?