Hey everybody - I've started to blog/journal about PDL at use.perl.org, and so far I've gotten some interest, which is great. I'm hoping to use these journal entries to refine some useful how-to documentation that I can add to PDL, eventually. For now, I'm just getting started, and the first post basically said, "I intend to write about PDL" and explains why I use PDL instead of Matlab. The second post gives installation instructions for 2.4.5.
I have gotten a few replies about that second post. One was from Adam Kennedy, complaining that PDL shouldn't need to 'be installed by a human'. Of course, it doesn't need to be installed by a human unless you want to be able to use PLplot or GSL. But that brings me to an interesting idea: Perhaps PDL's installer could query the system for the needed library. If it didnt' find what it was looking for, instead of just skipping the capability, it would ask the OS's package manager to install the missing library. If the OS doesn't have a package manager, like Windows or Slackware (sp?), PDL could download the source code from wherer the library is hosted and compile and install the library itself. All of this comes back to Ashton's Law: 'Just make it fucking easy to install.' Imagine how great it would be if somebody could download PDL from CPAN and get it to work with OpenGL, PLplot, and GSL without any additional work besides running 'install PDL'. Wouldn't that be great? David
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