On Thu, 20 Feb 2003, Tillman, James wrote: > Randy: Any idea what's going on with ActiveState's repository > these days? They seem to be terribly out of sync periodically. > You provide a wonderful service to us all through your > repository, but I'm concerned that the PPM system is becoming > fragmented and relies on ad-hoc information such as this email > list to get new perl users to where they need to go. Yours and > others are increasingly becoming the ones that we look to for > up-to-date packages that we need!
Thanks - glad what we have here is useful ... And I share your concerns about the fragmentation ... I'm not sure why ActiveState's repository occasionally doesn't have some common packages - it may be that that the build requires human intervention (eg, finding, or building an external library), or perhaps some of the tests of the module, or one of the dependencies, fails - I think ActiveState has a (reasonable) policy of not putting up a package if this happens. For the cases of GD, GDGraph, and GDTextUtil, some of the tests failed on recent versions (http://ppm.activestate.com/BuildStatus/5.8.html) for a variety of reasons (changes in the freetype lib, Win32 peculiarities, etc) - these are something a typical user probably wouldn't even come across, but deciding that is a judgement call. And given the size of CPAN (the above link lists 4680 packages, across 6 platforms), some sort of automated build system has to be used, in the first instance. I think ActiveState is sensitive to the problem, though - one can email [EMAIL PROTECTED] for ppm requests. I'm not sure if they'll manually build a package if much human intervention is required, or if they'll put up a package if some of the tests fail, but it may be worth asking. > As an aside: Has anyone given thought to a PPM aggregator? > It would be nice to have a central PPM registry that > auto-updated... Perhaps it could aggregate the PPD's and then > just redirect PPM to the true repositories for the tar.gz > files? Just a thought. That's an interesting suggestion ... It wouldn't be that hard to make up some sort of database from the ppds from various locations, and routinely update it, to provide such a service - it'd be a nice exercise in XML. I might look into that, if there's interest ... I could see ActiveState though worrying about quality control if such a thing originated with and so was "identified" with them - installing a defective package from someplace, and then having to undo the damage, can be frustrating, and isn't a great confidence builder. Perhaps they might go for a "contributed" section, where 3rd parties could contribute ppm packages, and ppm could search (after looking in the main repository) in such a section, and report any results as "contributed" (not subject to ActiveState's controls, buyer beware, and all that). And just to take things to extremes, there's been occasional talk about creating a "binary" CPAN, and Jarkko (in an article on use.perl.org) has indicated he'd be willing to share the scripts that run CPAN ... -- best regards, randy _______________________________________________ Perl-Win32-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/mysubs
