My apologies. My previous email was supposed to start a new thread. Here it is, with a new subject line, in hopes of setting things aright:
On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 9:07 PM, David Mertens <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > I should also mention that the business about detecting the user's OS and using its package manager to install the exernal dependency is not at all trivial. It's worthy of its own module (or ten).
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