*my personal take, and this thread does have "kvetch" in the subject :) *
> Alien is the conceptual namespace given to managing (or at least querying) > > local::lib provides a simple cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac, probably > > This is terrific, but what changed over the last couple of years in PDL that > made this possible? One click installations with 2D plotting for all platforms makes all the difference. It means that I can point collaborators to an install package, and get them using my scripts ASAP. My collaborators don't care at all about Alien, local::lib, CPAN or dependencies. They want something that works without thinking about the installation or support. If I can point an interested user to a one click install of PDL and it works, then we have a new user of PDL. As soon as they hit one roadblock, they're *gone*. It doesn't matter if it was a non-PDL dependency fail, they assume it's a PDL problem and they walk away. When you can seamlessly install SciPy with one click but your build of PDL requires knowledge of CPAN to build it, you immediately lose out on the mindshare. Unless there is a driving reason why they need to install/configure/maintain some package, people will go with what is (a) run by their friends/associates, so they have someone to ask them for local help, and (b) something that has a huge online support community with immediate response time. My current view of the PDL community is that there is a group of about 100-200 people who use and run PDL code, with 10 to 20 people in active voice on the mailing lists, and a significant fraction of these people have used PDL for > 5 years. If anyone knows what the current email distribution size is, it would be interesting to know. Matt _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
