On Fri, Jun 29, 2001 at 12:02:28PM -0400, Christopher Masto wrote:
> Having gone through much the same pain a couple of weeks ago (although
> I just broke down and installed the linux-jdk-1.3.1 port after Sun's
> web site told me to come back later), I eagerly await a pure-Perl
> replacement for FOP (http://xml.apache.org/fop/index.html)).
For the brief period of time when I was working for a commercial software
vendor, GOOBE was a priority (good out-of-the-box experience).
FreeBSD + Java may be an extreme case of poor GOOBE for Java, but it's
not just Java that's the issue here; it's the GOOBE for Java products.
I can't remember when I had such a truly bad experience with Perl
or products based on Perl (primarily through CPAN). The worst I've
seen is configure asking for input from the console (do you want
feature X?), failing for cause (you must install libexpat.so on
your system; find it here), or forcing Perl to be upgraded (mismatched
module versions). That's not to say that there aren't issues with
buggy modules, missing compilers, etc.
Nevertheless, a degenerate case for installing Perl never requires
transfers or temporary disk space measured in quarter gigabytes.
Worst-case-to-worst-case, Perl doesn't suck, and it's doing much
better than Java. I wonder which is easier to support post-install.
Z.
