On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 5:37 PM, Daniel Carrera <daniel.carr...@theingots.org> wrote: > Mark Overmeer wrote: >> >> And the next consideration: when we have a piece of software which >> administers Perl5 or Perl6 or Nokia.bin or Elf. Why stop there? >> What is the overlap? It is basically all just some blob of data with >> some associated meta-data to search and retreive the blobs. It is only >> the client side install tool which looks into the content of the package. >> Why not allow pure pod releases? A small step to documents in any other >> format. Why not share holiday pictures? Also just a blob of data with >> some meta-data. > > Your idea of using CPAN to share holiday pictures is one of the things that > really turned me off from your CPAN6 proposal. I do want this to be about > Perl, you don't, and that's a point where we differ. In my examples, > Nokia.bin is so that mobile users don't have to compile software on their > tiny CPUs. I can see merit in adding Ruby modules because in a new Parrot > world, there is real opportunity for Perl and Ruby to share libraries with > each other (e.g. Perl on Rails). But when you start talking about sharing > holiday pictures, you have completely left the Perl realm and I am > completely turned off.
I agree. Doing one thing well is so much better for everybody then doing a million things poorly. An assorted "blob of data" repository is far less valuable to the Perl5, Perl6, and Parrot communities then a dedicated library repository is. Adding metadata to something like the existing CPAN that describes language and implementation is a step that allows Perl6 libraries and maybe even POD-only releases (language="pod", platform="pod") to be supported in the short term and opens the possibility of multiple languages being supported in the future. However, adding these two bits of metadata cannot be used meaningfully to allow all sorts of random media, which is a Good Thing. We want a future CPAN to be "the place to go for supported and tested library packages for Perl and maybe other languages", not "the place where people dump assorted unrelated shit". --Andrew Whitworth
