On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> On Oct 18, 2007, at 11:40 PM, Chris Devers wrote:
>
> > Sorry, I'm confused -- why not just use Debian then?
>
> Yes.
"Yes" isn't a conventional answer to a "why not" question, but... sure.
> > You're basically saying you want their custom build & distribution
> > service, but that is (naturally, one might think) only available on
> > their Linux distribution.
>
> When you say 'their', who do you mean? If you mean debian, well yes.
> Everyone who uses debian stable gets this custom build system, that is
> the point of debian.
Yes, "Debian" was the last [proper] noun there, so the pronoun "their"
does indeed mean "Debian". Well done.
Back to the point, this is what I'm confused about. If what you want is,
pretty narrowly described, Debian's distribution system, then why are
you looking elsewhere? Are you saying Apple should adopt it wholesale?
I can't picture Debian taking the effort to port what they're doing to a
new platform, and expectially not a proprietary one, so it would have to
be a case of Apple either backporting Debian's patches & packages, or
duplicating the effort with the same intent but from scratch. I'm not
sure I can picture either of these things happening.
> > Apple already maintains the core OS software, including bundled open
> > source packages like Perl,
>
> Apple maintains Apple's version of the so-called open source software,
> but it does very little maintenance of community software or perl in
> general.
You must not have been paying attention to this thread.
Within a stable release of the OS (10.3.x, 10.4.x, 10.5.x, etc), there's
only security updates -- which, iirc, is exactly what Debian does.
When transitioning between major releases (10.3 -> 10.4, 10.4 -> 10.5),
things are updatedto the currently available stable version -- which,
iirc, is also exactly what Debian does.
How is this so different?
As for community software, you've got me there. I can't think of any
examples at all of Apple offering things to the community. Aside from
Webkit. And launchd. Oh and Bonjour. Oh and CUPS, if you're in to that
whole "printing" thing on your Debian machines. Oh and well I guess
Darwin & the mach kernel also count. Oh and I think some patches back to
the GCC suite, last I checked. But aside from those examples, you're
right, there's absolutely no community software available from Apple,
and certainly there doesn't seem to be any on CPAN.
> I want 5.10 to work without hassle on OS X (Leopard).
Maybe we need to define "hassle", but the concensus from everyone else
seems to be that installing your own copy is unlikely to be difficult,
once it comes out. Remember: a lot of the core Perl developers are Mac
users, so they'll already have been testing it there during development
rather than just porting to it post-release.
> I want my code to be run cross platform (I am talking CGI here - still
> there are big differences between LAMP and {M,A}AMP)
Care to elaborate? Most generic CGI scripts will run with only minor
modification on most versions of Perl, including Windows.
If you want the same code to run verbatim on a bunch of different
platforms, I think the general wisdom is that you're going to have to
target a common denominator, which will mean both [a] a version of the
software that is available on the shipping versions of everything you
target, and [b] a subset of the language functionality that has been
proven to work on all the target platforms you're thinking of.
If you go against either of those assumptions, then of course things are
not going to be as smooth as you're hoping for.
> I want the time and effort I invested in learning perl to be useful
> for developing native applications on Mac OS X. (I am willing to learn
> how to use CamelBones to accomplish this. Right now I think it best I
> learn Objective-C.)
"Native" contradicts "cross-platform", but whatever. As Sherm said,
you'll be able to do this, but it's not going to be bundled (and
therefore you may have a harder time packaging anything written this way
for general release distribution on Leopard, unless you also bundle up a
copy of Camelbones et al).
Keep in mind that Ruby & Python will also work for this, and <blasphemy>
they're both pretty good languages, too </blasphemy>.
> I am just asking for a reasonable, up-to-date, development environment
> so that I do not have to shell into a linux server to do the job I
> need to do.
So target the release version, or do like everyone else that's concerned
about this and install your own Perl. It's not hard to do, and it's
really not that different than how things are on Debian.
--
Chris Devers
