# from Michael G Schwern
# on Tuesday 10 October 2006 06:53 pm:
>Good noise in the "hey, this is what I just did isn't it neat?" noise.
> Not "hey, its been two days and nobody's said anything about my
> FANTASTIC IDEA!" noise. Lower the barrier to the author accepting
> the idea as much as possible which usually means writing the patch
> before you get explicit approval.
Quite true. Actually, I have since realized that most of my proposals
can be easily cloven in twain by the battle ax of compatibility and/or
maintenance overhead and that, from that viewpoint, they are actually
rather silly. Further, they are mostly aimed at the developer's
use-case. Even further, this connundrum is quite solvable and I will
report back with my solution tomorrow.
As for why I'm not submitting patches, I am starting from "here's a
thing that I do in my build subclass and I think it would be good to go
upstream." But, as I see it, every feature comes with the question:
"do you want this feature?" A simple "no" would suffice, and in this
particular case, "no" is probably even the right answer.
(Sorry. Yes, I've answered my own question. I should be wise enough by
now to know that there are no answers on the internet, but I guess I
still have to ask the internets in order to get them to appear under
the rug in the hall.)
The answer is simply that developer features do not belong in the
installer. The installer has enough to deal with, and Ken is doing a
fine job of that (thanks Ken.) So, I was thinking "upstream", but just
up the wrong stream.
While I'm at it, other features which do not belong in the installer:
dist
distcheck
distclean
distdir
distmeta
distsign
disttest
manifest
pardist
ppd
ppmdist
skipcheck
testcover
testdb
testpod
testpodcoverage
retest
html
As a rough count, these features contain about 300 lines of code and
probably at least half as much again in documentation, plus the entire
PPMMaker.pm, and subs that I'm not counting yet like _sign*,
do_create*, etc.
--Eric
--
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a
desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
--E.B. White
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