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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Jifty/Catalyst are too dang big 3 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • This is a perfect example of why Perl needs better packaging. Something like PAR [perl.org] seems to be a good idea, but people don't seem to use it. Odd given that many people are having [perl.org] problems [perl.org] with [perl.org] installing dependency-heavy Perl modules.

    The value of CPAN is greatly diminished if we don't have an easy packaging mechanism. Many PHP apps are much easier to install than equivalent Perl ones, solely due to dependencies.

    • If I wanted to release giant spaghetti-code apps that required a large standard library and reimplemented a bunch of functionality over and over again, and had no unit tests and no code reuse between applications at all, I imagine we could do installers as simple as PHP apps too.

      CPAN is complicated for a reason.

      The answer is not to make packages stupider, it's to make the CPAN tools smarter.
      • I don't like PHP and I'm not at all advocating PHP-style code and coding practices (do they have any, apart from 'hack'?). I'm just pointing out that many PHP apps, however dirty, are much easier to install.

        I don't see how bundling prerequisite modules with an application (e.g. Plagger) or large module does any harm. More disk space will be used, but in most cases that won't be a problem. Some may prefer to install modules separately, and I'm not seeking to stop that - I just want an easier way of distributing Perl apps.

        Making CPAN tools smarter isn't really the solution IMHO. Bundling is faster (than downloading n packages off CPAN), and good for packaging "traditional", desktop Perl apps (yes, there are several). The idea of downloading off CPAN, at least in the current form where the latest version of the module is always retrieved, isn't very good from a configuration management and QA perspective.

        I don't see how I was even remotely proposing to "make packages stupider". I'm talking about bundling modules together in such a way that they can be easily installed.

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