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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Fixing CPAN: Part 1 - Toolchain Communication 2 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • And if we ever want anyone that doesn't know Perl (who are by definition not competent with Perl) to install a Perl-based application from CPAN, we need to fix that.

    Is that really what we want to be aiming at? I mean, I think that CPAN (and CPANPLUS) is great, but the only people who know about it are Perl developers. It's great for us that the same method works (for some value of "works") on every platform that we use, but for the average user (or the average adminstrator of a computer with Perl instal

    • Yes, sysadmins that don't know Perl should be able to install the latest and greatest off CPAN.

      Yes, newbie programmers on the first day they start Perl should be able to install modules without having to deal with errors they don't yet know.

      You are correct that it would be better for users to use binary packages, and solutions for these exist.

      Unfortunately, nobody that I'm aware of has managed to find a way to package and maintain up to date a reasonably large subset of Perl. debian is at 3,000ish out of 11,000. I believe ports is higher, but I'm not sure of the current number.

      Or what if they don't use an operating system with a good set of binary packages.

      There's always ultimately going to be a need to move up and pull modules directly from the CPAN source repository.

      Frankly, I'd rather they install modules painlessly regardless of the method they are using.
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