* Todd Rinaldo <to...@cpanel.net> [2016-11-14 15:12]: > Long Term > > We need to fix the CPAN modules themselves.
I’m afraid that’s a pipe dream. You can fix the most popular part of CPAN but not even close to everything. There are still distributions containing broken Module::Install versions, years after the last bugfixes. Any solution that sets out from “we fix everything on CPAN” as a starting point is no solution at all. So the reality is this: if we make a change that makes most of CPAN non- installable then a quite significant fraction of it will be left behind and will never work again. My first thought for managing this ran in the direction of introducing a new flag in META for dists to opt in to installation under dot-free @INC, and then only dists that explicitly ask for it get it. The downside is that this will withhold the improvement from dists that already don’t depend on dot in @INC. It will take time till everything that can be installed under a dot-free @INC actually is. The upside is, dists which do depend on dot in @INC and are not actively maintained will continue being installable, indefinitely. In the longer term, a new version of the META spec could declare the new flag to be implicitly turned on, so the META in every new dist does not have to contain this boilerplate bit forever (much as saying `use 5.022` replaces the need to `use feature qw/mile-long litany to the present/`). This is a brain dump, mind you; I am not at all confident that there are no unintended consequences. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
