On Thursday, November 20, 2003, at 07:00 AM, Orton, Yves wrote:
Frankly until Module::Build works seamlessly by default with plain old CPAN
I would advance the opinion that it will never replace MakeMaker, and
potentially in the long run leave the community divided, with those of us
who can using Module::Build and those of us who cant or need to ensure
backwards compatibility not. I personally dont think that the balkanization
of CPAN is a fair price for the changes that Module::Build brings.
Well, consider that Module::Build has become backward-compatible into areas that MakeMaker has never been able to penetrate at all. MacPerl on Mac OS (not OS X), for example.
And because it doesn't have to know obscure facts about operating systems that its authors don't even have access to, a single version of Module::Build can work on perls from 5.005 up to 5.8.2.
Now if a concerted effort was made to ensure that Module::Build easily
installed everywhere (as seen with the prerequisites and Win32 build failure
it does not) and that _every_ distribution produced by Module::Build was
installable via CPAN.pm then I would feel much more confident about its
future.
The former is a good goal. As for the latter, that's really up to the author of the distributions, they get to decide how their distributions should be installed. I agree that Module::Build should try to help as much as it can, though.
-Ken
