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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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The Many Axes of Software Development 5 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Installer tools (Score:1)

    by srezic (8057) on 2008.12.02 15:35 (#66085) Journal

    The "better installer tools" are already there. Instead of typing

            install Some::Module

    just use

            notest install Some::Module

    or even

            force notest install Some::Module

    But it's another question if you still feel good after such an installation.

    • That is not a better installer tool. Imagine that you have something you want installed by people not familiar with CPAN. They probably don't even have the CPAN shell set up.

      They might want a single command that does everything right, or maybe they want a guided interactive install ("where do images go?"). CPAN just doesn't cut it for this sort of stuff.

      • The first question of a modern CPAN.pm is "Would you like me to configure as much as possible automatically?" And usually CPAN.pm is able to configure everything automatically.

        Strawberry Perl comes with a preconfigured CPAN/Config.pm. So the user does not see even this question.

        And then everything the user has to do is to write

                cpan Some::Module

        from command line. "force" seems to be available as an command line option, "notest" does not. Maybe this needs to be added.

        • Strawberry's version is pretty slick.

          But you can't assume a modern, properly configured CPAN shell in an installer. If the first part of your install documentation says "install a modern version of CPAN.pm and make sure it's configured correctly", that just won't cut it for many use cases.

          I like CPAN and think it's great for developers, but it's not really suitable for end-users of the applications we develop.

          • Well, add the field of various installation methods and
            installers as another axis to your list :-) It ranges
            from "download and install everything manually", over
            platform-independent installation helpers like CPAN/CPANPLUS,
            platform-dependent installation helpers (apt-get, yum, ppm,
            ports/packages ...) to installation binaries which cover everything (PAR,
            or a .msi/.exe installer).

            What I would like to see is a "meta packager" which would spit out .deb, .rpm, .ppm, .msi, .dmg etc. for every platform, but doing t

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