use Perl

• agreed (Score:2)

  by jhi (318) <jhi@iki.fi> on 2006.09.24 23:45 (#50372) Homepage Journal

  > I still much prefer the concept of having the CPAN installer "co-ordinate" with other platform-specific binary package installers.
  
  I.e. ask dpkg, ask rpm, ask Windows installation machinery/registry, etc. whether this external application/library/developer SDK has been installed, etc. In itself that is not very hard: packaging tool specific plugings (query/install/uninstall) and then a large database of mappings (what is this package called under this packaging tool, and how is this package distributed into subpackages under this packaging system, and how are the versions mapped).
  
  This, indeed, was the original idea of the Alien:: namespace. I should know, I was in the meeting where this idea was discussed.
  
  And I would prefer if that original idea would be kept as it is. The idea of compiling (attempting to compile) and detecting stuff is almost completely different, and much harder. I prefer people, including myself, first trying something simple and getting that working well. And if you still want to go the way of test compiling, please come up with a different namespace. That's why we have different namespaces.
  

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  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Alias (5735)

    > This, indeed, was the original idea of the Alien:: namespace. I should know, I was in the meeting where this idea was discussed.
    
    I find this odd though, because I've never seen any of this.
    
    Based on what was uploaded to CPAN, I had come to see Alien:: as "We need this one specific thing really bad, so any evil thing you have to, just get it installed".
    
    I never really saw it as something that co-ordinates with various platform-specific backends.
    
    If so, I would have expected some to see some sort of Install:
    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jhi (318)

      > So how did your original concept get turned so backwards?
      
      So how long have you been around this community, anyway? :-) Just kidding. Kind of.
      
      That was the idea as I remember it. Maybe I didn't communicate it clearly enough. Maybe some other idea was thrown around that stuck more in people's minds. Maybe I should have followed up on the idea to produce actual implementations so that there would have been a precedent. I don't know.
      
      But I still think it's a good idea. Instead of trying to be essentially