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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Dave Winer on Slashcode 3 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • So, setting up Slash is more complex than setting up a weblog on Radio Userland. Isn't that like saying that setting up use.perl is more difficult than starting a journal on use.perl?
    --
    jweveland [prohosting.com]
    • I thought Radio was the thing you install locally - windows only...

      Dunno though. I honestly wouldn't listen to a single word Dave Winer says.
      • A few years ago, I used to read Dave's scripting.com web site, and would periodically send him email about the content of the site, and sometimes discuss things with him. Once too often I sent email to him that annoyed him -- I think on this occasion I asked him not to call something a "truly random number generator" when it was only pseudorandom -- and he requested that I stop reading his web site, so I did. And I haven't looked back since. :-)

        Anyway, of course Slash is more difficult to set up. It is a hell of a lot more powerful and flexible, too. It could be simpler, and I think in some ways the book makes it sound a little harder than it is. If you happen to already have Apache/mod_perl set up properly, MySQL installed, and Perl up and running (preferably with all the modules in Bundle::Slash), Slash is very simple to install. make install, run a site install script, add an include line to your httpd.conf (and if necessary configure your VirtualHost), and you are ready to go. Sure, we could have included a database, web server, and all those modules in Slash, but we decided to make installing a bit more difficult and leverage existing code. :-)

        Some people have suggested RPMs and Debian packages etc. Certainly there is room for something like Apache Toolbox to set up and configure everything. It really isn't that difficult to go that route, but no one's really stepped forward to do it, and we're busy coding. I figure that if people really cared enough about it they would go that route, and aside from non-Linux platforms (where our makefile sometimes totally breaks), there really isn't a significant problem.

        Moving along, Slash does in fact address most of the issues a publishing system has to, moreso than Radio Userland does. He's simply wrong. OK, to clarify, his claim isn't explained at all and is completely useless as presented, and I can make the same claim with the same measure of truth. What is "publishing system"? Which issues? In what way does it not address those issues? It's a comment that seems to be designed to make himself look good and Slash look bad without actually saying anything of value. Of course, the last time I saw him set up a comparison between products (Frontier and AppleScript), I added Perl to the comparison, and that predictably annoyed him.

        And I have no idea what he means by "respectful." Maybe he means Slashdot doesn't respect other users very much? *shrug* That has nothing to do with the code, of course.

        What he -- and in fairness, most people -- doesn't understand is that Slash can be whatever you want it to be. It's an app framework and server that is geared primarily toward a certain purpose, but it can do whatever you want it to. SourceForge.net is using it for its foundries. Linux.com and NewsForge use it. OSDN.com uses it. pudge.net uses it. All of these sites use it in very different ways. Slash is so much more than "blogging" (I hate that word so much), and if you don't like how it does it, you can write your own "blogging" plugin, or modify Slash::Journal to do what you want.
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