...Parrot will be able to save and reuse it's bytecode, which might give you something close to a platform specific executable...
Wasn't the objective a non-platform specific way to install modules?
In any case, portable bytecode is helpful, but I think we'll still see a certain percentage of modules that need to be compiled. Unless someone deems it worthwhile to rewrite, say the MySQL network protocol libraries, in Parrot. (Although on platforms with dynamically loadable libraries, if Parrot can talk to them without needing compiled glue code, like an XS, then the need for compiled code should go way down.)
No. But I can't install a PPM on Linux either AFAIK.
Surprisingly Active State maintains a Perl distribution for (RedHat) Linux (or at least they did), and I believe a repository of PPMs as well.
I think there can be a lot of improvement here. A big step in the right direction would be for someone (not me) to periodically generate a big zip file of all of CPAN for each platform.
So compile all the non pure Perl modules in advance, for all of CPAN, for every popular platform?
Probably something that could be piggybacked upon or an extension of the cpan-testers system that's already in place. After all, in order to test a module, you have to build it. (It would be triggered by the release of individual modules, rather than done in batch, and you'd get spotty platform coverage, just as with cpan-testers, but better than nothing.)
On a related note, a colleague recently asked if there was a tool available to help automate the installation of a Perl program and its corresponding modules on a target system (which could be Linux or Windows), while requiring minimal user knowledge or intervention.
Obviously it would be easy enough to throw together a Perl script to do this (could even use PAR to package it up and include a GUI), which would in turn make use of CPAN.pm to pull in any necessary modules, but his concern was that a novice user (the target audience being a user of the application, not a Perl developer) could easily be thrown off by the configuration that CPAN requires, and any modules requiring compilation could pose a problem.
He was thinking more along the lines of installing pre-compiled modules supplied with the application, which could always be done simply by copying files, but I wonder if CPAN.pm has a programmatic interface for doing installation from a local repository while skipping the initial configuration?
(I also suggested the idea of packaging the application itself with PAR, which would require platform specific distributions, but avoid the installation issue.)
Also, it would be good to know if anyone is aware of Perl-specific installation tools. I know 3 or so years ago when I was looking into installation options for a Perl application, there wasn't much, and ended up using a commercial installation tool (for Windows).
-Tom
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