I see two resolutions to this problem:
1) Module authors need to re-release their modules whenever
Module::Install is updated.
This is extremely inconvenient, but not a terrible demand. If other
authors are like me, they accumulate small minor changes to their
modules, and then release when something important comes along. A new
M::I is "important" and would force us to keep our "stable" CPAN modules
up-to-date with our svn repositories or whatever. That's a good thing
;) , but probably not the right way of going about it. (For the record,
all my M::I modules use the latest version, and I went to no special
effort to ensure that. So maybe this isn't as hard as it sounds.)
(The right way of going about this, BTW, is out of the scope of this
e-mail... but I do have some ideas...)
2) Get M::I into the core of perl, so that everyone has a known-good
tested-everywhere version.
This is the best idea. CPAN works so well because everyone has it and
it's a good piece of software (lately CPANPLUS has gotten rather buggy
and I've gone back to regular CPAN!).
The other solutions (like "kwality" or whatever it's called) are stopgap
measures that don't fix anything. Anyone that knows about the kwality
site probably reads this list ;) and knows to update M::I anyway. The
other 90% of the modules are one-offs whose authors have "better" things
to do, probably, than re-release their module whenever a point release
of some obscure dependency is released :).
For the time being, maybe someone just needs to download the broken
modules, fix the inc directory, and upload them back to the CPAN ;)
That would actually solve the problem. (And introduce many others, but...)
Actually now I see a third resolution: don't use M::I for CPAN modules.
CPAN (the software) handles dependency installing, it's standard with
perl, good enough. I do like M::I, I just can't think of why it's
really necessary for CPAN modules. (For non-CPAN perl packages, though,
it's a GREAT idea.)
Regards,
Jonathan Rockway
I don't think I like it. It makes me nervous for some reason... For
example, who's to say what constitutes a bad version of an installer
(actually, this only applies to M::I, since the other installers
aren't generally bundled, but I don't mind defending M::I here). In
this case, you've declared every version prior to some arbitrary
release to be bad. I doubt that is the case. I think there might have
been problems with one or two releases, but being an old release is
not the same as being a flawed release.
