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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Talking with Alan Burlison about Perl v PHP, Solaris v Linux 2 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Insisting on staying compatible with technology which is simply too old? Maybe the 5.5 compatibility habit was developed when 5.6 came out. Perhaps we should drop 5.5 (and even start sharpening the axe for 5.6) once 5.10 arrives.

    Perl has *actually* changed in that time. Being compatible means programming with your hands tied behind your back.

    And then there's ExtUtils::MakeMaker, which apparently is the favored installer of 99.9% of CPAN users (at least, if you take the default options of CPAN or CPANPLUS
    • If ExtUtils::MakeMaker still got the upper hand on Module::Build like CPAN does compared to CPANPLUS, it's because they work flawlessly (if you accept its quirks).

      I believe the greater problems with M::B and CPANPLUS is one of resistance, not enough feedback for authors, and maybe lack of developers' time (like in the recent thread discussing Parrot). They are supposed to be better than their counterparts, but they are not there yet.

      The support for EU::MM is omniscient. The support for M::B is not there sometimes. For example, chris' smoke servers report failures on modules that only provides Build.PL scripts. That means you can't get rid of the compatibility concerns (no matter what).

      The case of CPAN and CPANPLUS looks different. CPAN keeps getting better incrementally thanks to the work by Andreas. It has some subtle advantages that many can think it does not make difference, but it does. For example, CPAN is a memory-expensive application which can be improved in this aspect by CPAN::SQLite. CPANPLUS is an even larger memory hog (without remedy). That means in a under-powered machine, you go with CPAN. And many of these machines run in many places.

      The whole point of my entry is that you can't promote the compatibility break when you don't have yet adequate replacements for the old tools people grew used to.

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