On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 01:38:25PM -0800, chromatic wrote: > Here are my assumptions: > > * anyone building Parrot now can install dependencies (working C compilation > environment, potentially a bignum library, some CPAN modules, potentially > flex/bison or equivalents)
Personally, I'm fine with upgrading our requirement to Storable-2.18 (or whatever). But I do want to note that until this change was made, I was able to built Parrot in my base Linux distribution (Kubuntu 8.04) without having to install _any_ CPAN modules or even to set up the CPAN installer. Requiring Storable 2.18 changes that for me. So it's not just a question of whether I _can_ do something; it's that I now _must_ do something where before it was optional. Other considerations that come to my mind: - Some (e.g. students) may be in environments where they can build Parrot but might not be able to easily install CPAN modules. It's been a very long time since I've attempted to install a module in my home directory (instead of the system dirs), but ISTR it wasn't trivial. - Some interested in Parrot for languages _other_ than Perl 6 might be put off by having to learn about CPAN and install a CPAN module in order to get Parrot to work. Chromatic mentioned moving to 2.18 last night and at the time I didn't see any problems with it, but I think I mistakenly assumed that my distribution would already be running at least that version. It's only today when I attempted to rebuild on my desktop machine that I discovered there were now additional steps involved for me. And to repeat my first statement: it's perfectly okay with me if we increase the requirement to 2.18 -- I just wanted to add my experience of the results to the discussion. Pm