Hi,
Tyler MacDonald wrote:
And now that I think about it, I'm not so convinced about that whole
"concenience for the end user" nonsense. If they're mucking about installing
perl modules from the CPAN packages by themself, they're probably developers
that need some extra time to sit there and think about what sort of madness
they're getting themselves into anyway.
I strongly disagree! CPAN is the preferred source for any Perl modules
and the associated tools like CPAN.pm or CPANPLUS are the preferred
method of installing them. Why? Because since you are not going to see
all modules in .deb or whatever packages and not in the most recent
versions. Using both the system's package system and CPAN's for module
installation is going to bite you on most systems some day.
Also, if you write applications that use CPAN modules, you might a) not
have the license to include the modules or b) not want to be responsible
for maintaining the bundled versions or c) not want to inflict 5
gazillion installed versions of module Foo on every user and d) not want
to create different distributions for different platforms.
Thus, user's need to be able to install Perl modules from CPAN.
Of course, that's just my understanding and my opinion. I have had to
maintain such a cross-platform application that needed to bundle a lot
of modules. It was hell.
We're extraordinarily lucky to have such a good toolchain and such a
great repository of modules.
Steffen
