use Perl

• Your description of PDL makes me want to avoid it (Score:2)

  by Alias (5735)

  Every time someone says "No no no no, unlike the rest of CPAN, this one has to be installed by a human" I want to avoid those modules, because if that's the case how will I ever embed that thing in something larger, such that the person installing the larger thing doesn't need to know anything about how it works underneath.
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by david m (9460)

    Sure, that's fair. I'm afraid I didn't really stress that you can install PDL from CPAN without doing anything special that I discussed above. (I've edited my original post to reflect this.) PDL's installer will detect if you've got OpenGL or PLplot installed, and skip those steps if it doesn't find it. You really only need to do the special stuff if you want to visualize your data or use the GSL.

    You do raise an important point, of course. Suppose you wanted to write a module or program that uses PDL t
    • Re:Your description of PDL makes me want to avoid (Score:1)

      by david m (9460) on 2009.10.27 0:05 (#70984) Journal

      Here is a module that checks if your OS has installed some package through its installer instead of directly via cpan [cpan.org], and here is an interface to Debian's apt [cpan.org]. I envision something more like the latter, but something that works for many systems so that you could specify a hash like:

      require_external({
         type => 'lib',
         name => 'PLplot',
         Windows => 'PROGRAM_FILES/plplot/plplot.dll',
         Windows_inst => "http://sourceforge...",
         Linux => 'plplot.so',
         src => "http://sourceforge...",
         Ubuntu => libplplot.so',
         Ubuntu_inst => "http://getdeb...",
         version => 2.1,
         # etc, etc
      });

      Then it would call the installer for your OS. If the dependency could be satisfied (specifically, the version requirement) it would make the OS install it. Otherwise, it would download the source and compile it, or download an installer and run it.

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