I'm pretty sure that's true for all such systems, including things like .war files.
Even if we split, say, Strawberry from ActivePerl, what if you have multiple installations of ActivePerl? Adam K On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 8:56 AM, Jan Dubois <j...@activestate.com> wrote: > On Thu, 15 Apr 2010, Barbie wrote: >> On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 02:58:12PM -0700, Jan Dubois wrote: >> > Yes, it certainly downloads prerequisites from the configured repositories. >> > I was talking about downloading .ppmx files from some random website that >> > you didn't configure first as a repository in the PPM client. The double- >> > clicked file is not able to download additional prerequisites from that >> > "random website" it came from itself. Think "private/internal repository >> > of a bunch of interdependent modules". >> >> Got it. However, I was thinking the initial file (ppmx) would essentially >> be a stand-alone download, the installer would then revert to the >> predefined repos to download the prerequisites. > > Yes, that's how it works. > >> In PPM's case there are only a few repos that try to keep up with CPAN, >> so knowing where the original repo was may be significant. > > This is not important for modules on CPAN. It is important for modules > whose prerequisites are *not* on CPAN and only exist in the same location > as the original ppmx file. > > The way around this is probably to implement a protocol handler like > > ppm://random.example.com/repo/my-random-module.ppmx > > That way the browser would invoke the protocol handler with the full URL > > ppm install ppm://random.example.com/repo/my-random-module.ppmx > > instead of downloading the tarball via HTTP itself and then just passing > a local filename to the installer: > > ppm install /tmp/downloads/my-random-module.ppmx > > Implementing a protocol handler for the major operating systems is somewhat > more involved than just setting up a file extension/MIME type mapping though. > >> However, if we're downloading from CPAN, then it would be reasonable >> to try and grab prereqs from a predefined set of CPAN mirrors. > > This all is not an issue if the "extension mechanism" only has to work > for CPAN and can ignore the DarkPAN. > > One other issue that has been ignored so far is that neither the file > extension nor the protocol scheme will work particular well if you have > multiple Perl installations on your machine. You cannot direct the > automatic download/install to a particular instance. > > Cheers, > -Jan > >
