The installation process needs to know at least:
1. where the accompanying DB-building script should go
2. where the DB that the app builds should go
How can such necessary things be determined, other than by asking
the user?
I was just going to add a note before or after these two queries,
that if they have a mod_perl2 library and want the module to go
there, they should "do this".
As I just wrote to Perrin off-list, since only a tiny fraction of
CPAN downloads are mod_perl2 modules, no one can configure CPAN
for a mod_perl2 library.
Perhaps my attitude toward installation dialogs has been warped
by recent experience with my previous CPAN module IPC::MMA. The
install for version 0.54 contained no prompts. Its results came
out 75% unknown, because few test environments included a
necessary C library 'mm'. One of the chief testers suggested I
should add Devel::CheckLib to Makefile.PL.
So now if Makefile.PL doesn't find 'mm' in /usr/local/lib, it
prompts the user to enter the path to 'mm', which is then passed
to Devel::CheckLib. The query is accompanied by a note showing
the URL from which 'mm' can be downloaded.
On the other hand, my latest version 0.58 has only been tested by
one tester, a week after uploading it. Maybe that's because of
the new query in Makefile.PL!
Best Regards,
cmac
On Aug 26, 2009, at 10:44 AM, Michael Peters wrote:
cr...@animalhead.com wrote:
Including a note about how to do something in an installation dialog,
for people who wouldn't otherwise know, is not controlling anything.
Please don't put a dialog in your installation process! CPAN is
supposed to be automatic after it's been configured. There are some
rare occasions where it makes sense to ask some questions, but
where you want the module installed is not one of them. CPAN takes
care of that.
--
Michael Peters
Plus Three, LP
