-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Szemeti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 21 December 2000 14:04
>I would suggest that anyone capable of installing Linux will have no
>bother at all typing
>$perl -MCPAN - e shell
>how simple can it be?
Agreed with the perl bit but setting up a base Linux box is becoming
very simple, I have a box in the corner that runs mandrake 7.0 and
gets wiped every week or so, it takes twenty minutes to get a nice
base install. Most of the options are autodetected and if you click
newbie setup it asks about three questions so I'm very dubious about
the skill needed for installing linux, I can see your point about how
simple it is (-MCPAN) once you've used it once or twice but if
someone's moving from Windows to Linux it won't be the first thing
that they think of and having a nice *familiar* ppm system will help
ease them in.
I like the -e shell function, searching for modules by author is
something thats lacking from ppm and should be added. Also once its
set up with readline and other stuff like that it blows ppm out of the
water for functionality.
>I have to disagree most strongly there .. i spent a good while
bashing my
>head because they'd ported DBI::Proxy to the new 5.6 version of ppm
..
>but had not ported RPC::something that was a dependency. various
>fragments became available as ppm and promptly didnt work .. ISTR it
>being a major headache at the time.
The 5.6 ppm's were shall we say 'fragile' for the first two months or
so, a lot of the base stuff seemed to have
slightly iffy dependency problems and some people got caught out by
installing 5.5 and 5.6 packages in the same tree. Sounds like you got
caught at the raw end of it though, still thats what you get for being
a pioneer ;)
>at the end of the day even if yer -MCPAN fails typing perl
>Makefile.PL/make/make install is not THAT hard .. this is programmers
we
>are talking about here .. easy peasy n'est pas?
Makefiles are no where near the norm on the Windows boxes where the
bulk of ActiveState's users currently reside, learning how makefiles
work (And I have to admit my experience in writing makefiles is very
small) is yet another hurdle for people moving from Win to Nix.
Although this might be a good way of making them get there feet wet ;)
>so .. OK .. I'll grant you its useful (infact it rocks) as a windows
port
>of perl .. the ppm thing is sorta OK .. I prefer to compile it myself
if
>I can .. I have a copy of nmake and a suitaible compiler and it all
>seems to happen usually ..
Question for you, if you compile perl under Win32 with one compiler
and then compile modules under another compiler do you get problems
using it? I only ever really use the one compiler so I've not come
across it but I've heard it can be awkward. Be nice to know what
happens with out having to try it myself :)
>but for *nix I see it as a dangerous
>splintering .. theres already the defacto standard for *unix and you
hope
>that it still works under ActiveState/Win32.. but are prepared to be
>disappointed (mainly because the OS is missing several major
features) ...
>but I can't see any strong advantage to running it on *nix .. infact
>since every major *nix distro comes with Perl as standard the level
of
>cluefulness required to install it is much greater than the level of
>cluefulness required to do the cpan thing, so I cant see the ease of
ppm
>(which is no easier than the MCPAN thing imho) being a factor .
Why did you have to come up with a very good argument?
I'm not too sure where I think the two module managers should go, ppm
is needed on Windows for 85% of
the Win Perl Users, its too much effort for most people to get working
c compiler, nmake and all the other pre-requisites and then build
their own modules. For them (And often for me) I still think that
PPM's the way to go. I use -MCPAN when I'm on Linux and to be honest I
wouldn't use ppm on Linux, it wouldn't be worth it but I can agree
with making PPM available to ease the transition of Win perlers but
maybe making it just call -MCPAN -e shell and adding wrappers for some
of the commands, that way you'd avoid the splintering of development.
What might be interesting is if Activestate starts shipping ActivePerl
with one of the Major Linux distros like SUSE, Redhat and Mandrake, if
they did ppm might make some rapid movement into the turf of -MCPAN :)
PPM or -MCPAN? As someone said tmtowtdi.
>just my 2 penneth. now .. how can I get it onto my lapto tha has
no
>cdrom or network card? ... I see a very long 9600 baud call to demon
...
Floppy's, shed loads of floppies :) Although I've got one of the old
100mb Zip drives I use for stuff like this :)
Dean
--
Profanity is the one language all programmers understand.
--- Anon
