Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside...
On 20/04/11 23:17, Peter Edwards wrote: Imagine you're supporting a 3 year old code base that needs specific versions of DBIx::Class, Catalyst, Moose and Class::MOP to make it run, and when you do a upgrade via yum or apt-get or cpan random things break in your regression tests and you don't have the budget to go fix all of them. (No, that's not where I work now but it is a real world situation.) Which is a pretty serious indictment of CPAN and the attitudes of the people that maintain software there. How can anyone expect businesses to use perl and CPAN when stuff is likely to break (sometimes big time) when one upgrades the toolchain? Why does stuff on CPAN so frequently not maintain backward compatibility? Dirk
Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside...
* Dirk Koopman (d...@tobit.co.uk) [110421 08:08]: On 20/04/11 23:17, Peter Edwards wrote: Imagine you're supporting a 3 year old code base that needs specific versions of DBIx::Class, Catalyst, Moose and Class::MOP to make it run, and when you do a upgrade via yum or apt-get or cpan random things break in your regression tests and you don't have the budget to go fix all of them. (No, that's not where I work now but it is a real world situation.) Which is a pretty serious indictment of CPAN and the attitudes of the people that maintain software there. CPAN was never made to maintain software. It is made to distribute software. When you upload something to it, there is no warning that you will become responsible for its future. In my experience, any upgrade will cause some headeach. Not only upgrades of Perl modules. Gladly there are regression tests to warn you at an early stage. How can anyone expect businesses to use perl and CPAN when stuff is likely to break (sometimes big time) when one upgrades the toolchain? One of the weak points of CPAN is that you can only install the latest version of a module. One of the reasons for that is the 02packages list which is used to figure-out which distribution (tar.gz) is needed for a certain module (pm). There can only be one dist per pm. So, you need to set-up your own local archive using cpanmini or cpansite with the versions you prefer on your systems. Or: fix the versions of the yum/apt packages you get installed by collecting those yourself... Open Source tends to say last is best, where serious system administrators say: everywhere the same is best. Why does stuff on CPAN so frequently not maintain backward compatibility? You do not only have to take care about your own code, but also about Perl and about the code of all dependencies. Cpantesters helps a lot, but only after you have uploaded a broken version. As demonstration of cpan6, I have created a full backpan archive, where you can get the 02packages of any day in history. So you can then say install DBIx::Simple with the knowledge of 2001-02-12 as yum Large parts of the code is ready... still needs a few days work. -- Regards, MarkOv Mark Overmeer MScMARKOV Solutions m...@overmeer.net soluti...@overmeer.net http://Mark.Overmeer.net http://solutions.overmeer.net
Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside...
On 21/04/2011 09:26, Mark Overmeer wrote: CPAN was never made to maintain software. It is made to distribute software. When you upload something to it, there is no warning that you will become responsible for its future. And this, folks, is precisely why I use Drupal these days.
Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside...
On Wed, 2011-04-20 at 23:06 -0400, Jesse Vincent wrote: He's embarrassed that didn't think to run apt-get install libnet-twitter-perl? That doesn't work so well on a vanilla OS X box. Whcih is what his workstation is. That's not a perl fail but rather a fail on the part of those who package (or don't package) perl modules for that platform. In fairness it's also a fail on the various Linux platforms I've encountered too as nobody has, so far, produced a comprehensive cpan to $whatever_distro repository There is a toolchain bug. Perl's toolchain can't find XCode. Is it really the responsibility of the perl toolchain to do that? Surely it's a platform responsibility to provide a reliable dependency chain whether the platform is an OS distro or something else.
Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside...
On 21/04/2011, at 7:08 PM, Jason Clifford wrote: On Wed, 2011-04-20 at 23:06 -0400, Jesse Vincent wrote: He's embarrassed that didn't think to run apt-get install libnet-twitter-perl? That doesn't work so well on a vanilla OS X box. Whcih is what his workstation is. That's not a perl fail but rather a fail on the part of those who package (or don't package) perl modules for that platform. In fairness it's also a fail on the various Linux platforms I've encountered too as nobody has, so far, produced a comprehensive cpan to $whatever_distro repository I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. I've spent a fairly small amount of time lately packaging up perl applications for 4 or 5 different operating systems, on systems with varying degrees of security (ie. from apps that need root, to locked down windows workstations and uncooperative admins). On a unixy system, grabbing the latest stable perl, and compiling a relocatable binary is the go. After that either update $PATH or call the perl binary explicitly and install cpanminus is by far the lowest friction strategy. The only trouble I've had with this approach is Alien::SVN's insistence that it compiles binaries to /usr/lib. If I didn't have root on that system I would have been more annoyed. Oh and some module was broken in version 0.45 in linux, so I bisected old versions, and it turned out that version 0.44 installed OK, so I shoved a comment in the Makefile.PL, and in INSTALL.pod. The fact that admins will be expanding an archive rather than having to go through the install machinations themselves makes the inconvenience minor. On windows, strawberry portable perl is the go. Just like the unix version except much slower (at least on the VMs I use, and the ludicrously underpowered/small disk space workstation that $employer[0] gives me). Does anyone have a .bat file handy that will strip out all the toolchain stuff for deployment? And if you're so inclined you can keep your ~/perl install in a git repository, and while there's some overhead to this, it's a handy way to annotate what you've been doing with your perl. Of course I don't do sysadmin type stuff. If I did I'd be using the system perl, pure perl modules and App::FatPacker (oh and Path::Class). However, none of this is a solution for your management problems. Leave the system perl for the system and the system will leave perl up to you.
Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside...
On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 10:38 AM, Simon Cozens si...@simon-cozens.org wrote: On 21/04/2011 09:26, Mark Overmeer wrote: CPAN was never made to maintain software. It is made to distribute software. When you upload something to it, there is no warning that you will become responsible for its future. And this, folks, is precisely why I use Drupal these days. Do they make any guarantee like that? -- Zbigniew Lukasiak http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/ http://perlalchemy.blogspot.com/
Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside...
On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 10:08:16AM +0100, Jason Clifford wrote: On Wed, 2011-04-20 at 23:06 -0400, Jesse Vincent wrote: There is a toolchain bug. Perl's toolchain can't find XCode. Is it really the responsibility of the perl toolchain to do that? Yes. FWIW, it has managed to find XCode just fine on all my machines. Maybe this is a recently introduced bug, or some new version of XCode does things differently. -- David Cantrell | Enforcer, South London Linguistic Massive There is no one true indentation style, But if there were KR would be Its Prophets. Peace be upon Their Holy Beards.
Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside...
On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 10:26:45AM +0200, Mark Overmeer wrote: As demonstration of cpan6, I have created a full backpan archive, where you can get the 02packages of any day in history. So you can then say install DBIx::Simple with the knowledge of 2001-02-12 as yum Large parts of the code is ready... still needs a few days work. See also http://cpxxxan.barnyard.co.uk/ -- David Cantrell | top google result for topless karaoke murders Godliness is next to Englishness
Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside...
On Thu, 2011-04-21 at 10:26 +0200, Mark Overmeer wrote: As demonstration of cpan6, I have created a full backpan archive, where you can get the 02packages of any day in history. So you can then say install DBIx::Simple with the knowledge of 2001-02-12 as yum That sounds really useful! signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside...
On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 12:33:52PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote: On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 10:08:16AM +0100, Jason Clifford wrote: On Wed, 2011-04-20 at 23:06 -0400, Jesse Vincent wrote: There is a toolchain bug. Perl's toolchain can't find XCode. Is it really the responsibility of the perl toolchain to do that? Yes. FWIW, it has managed to find XCode just fine on all my machines. Maybe this is a recently introduced bug, or some new version of XCode does things differently. Jamie swears that it's a vanilla vendor Perl on a new 10.6.7 box with XCode 4. Someone spotted it trying to use the _ppc_ compiler at some point during the build. I don't currently have suitable test hardware to try to repro it on. :/
Fwd: Perl 5.14.0 Release Candidate 1
Perl 5.14.0 Release Candidate 1 is out! Please test it with your work code for any showstoppers. Leon -- Forwarded message -- From: Jesse Vincent je...@fsck.com Date: 20 April 2011 13:52 Subject: Perl 5.14.0 Release Candidate 1 To: perl5-port...@perl.org But then Australia is such a difficult country to keep track of. On my first visit, some years ago, I passed the time on the long flight reading a history of Australian politics in the twentieth century, wherein I encountered the startling fact that in 1967 the prime minister, Harold Holt, was strolling along a beach in Victoria when he plunged into the surf and vanished. No trace of the poor man was ever seen again. This seemed doubly astounding to me—first that Australia could just _lose_ a prime minister (I mean, come on) and second that news of this had never reached me. -- Bill Bryson, /In a Sunburned Country/ I've just uploaded the first release candidate for Perl 5.14.0 to PAUSE. Shortly, you'll find it at: http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl-5.14.0-RC1/ SHA1 sums for this release are: 643d688909723aaedbaef67301779331b3d51381 perl-5.14.0-RC1.tar.bz2 ed6be1b0f09af7542df369af254b629dbf5a8b5c perl-5.14.0-RC1.tar.gz While we go to lengths to ensure that new versions of Perl don't break existing programs, it does happen. It's really, really important that we catch unintentional breakage BEFORE we release Perl 5.14.0. It is imperative that you test this release candidate with any software written in Perl which you use or maintain. Similarly, we test Perl on a variety of operating systems on a number of platforms with several different compilers. If you're not 100% certain that we're testing yours, NOW is the time to make sure that Perl 5.14.0 builds and passes its tests on your platform. If no showstopper class bugs are found in the next 7 days, we will release a virtually identical tarball as Perl 5.14.0 on Thursday, April 28, 2011. Best, Jesse signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside...
On 21 Apr 2011, at 12:37, Denny wrote: On Thu, 2011-04-21 at 10:26 +0200, Mark Overmeer wrote: As demonstration of cpan6, I have created a full backpan archive, where you can get the 02packages of any day in history. So you can then say install DBIx::Simple with the knowledge of 2001-02-12 as yum That sounds really useful! Isn't CPAN on Time Machine?
Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside...
* Dave Hodgkinson (daveh...@gmail.com) [110421 12:13]: install DBIx::Simple with the knowledge of 2001-02-12 as yum Isn't CPAN on Time Machine? No. But we have backpan, where all the modules ever uploaded are kept. The main problem is that the administration 02packages (etc) files which are used during installations have not been preserved. It is very hard to get them back correctly, where you may find name-space conflicts. The first to use a namespace wins. So, to regenerate the index files correctly, you have to replay CPAN insert (pause) from its origin... It has also not been tracked which modules where removed from CPAN because of copyright problems and such. The whole archive lives in a current situation only mood. -- Regards, MarkOv Mark Overmeer MScMARKOV Solutions m...@overmeer.net soluti...@overmeer.net http://Mark.Overmeer.net http://solutions.overmeer.net
Re: Jobs in London
On 23 March 2011 12:43, David Cantrell da...@cantrell.org.uk wrote: On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 12:32:11PM +, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: On 23 Mar 2011, at 11:16, David Cantrell wrote: IME it's the norm for large employers. Even at smaller employers my experience is that that's generally what it says in the contract, although in practice they either go bankrupt or I choose to quit. Or you bankrupt them? You're confusing me with Aaron. Pah! I'm pretty sure I've passed that jinx onto somebody else.. don't know who though. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside...
On 21 Apr 2011, at 12:52, Jesse Vincent wrote: Jamie swears that it's a vanilla vendor Perl on a new 10.6.7 box with XCode 4. Someone spotted it trying to use the _ppc_ compiler at some point during the build. I don't currently have suitable test hardware to try to repro it on. :/ Could it be related to this? http://transfixedbutnotdead.com/2010/01/24/mac-os-x-snow-leopard-10-6-and-perl/ (I use the 32-bit version, without problems) Cheers, Pedro
[ANNOUNCE] London Perl M[ou]ngers May Social - 2011-05-05 - The Gunmakers Arms, Clerkenwell EC1R
Hi all, Next month's social will be on Thursday 5 May, and we will be going back to The Gunmakers Arms, where Jeff will be providing space, foamy beers, tasty cider and yummy food as usual, starting from 18:30. Details: The Gunmakers Arms 13 Eyre Street Hill Clerkenwell EC1R 5ET http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Gunmakers%2C_EC1R_5ET Standard blurb: Social meets are a chance for the various members of the group to meet up face to face and chat with each other about things - both Perl and (mostly) non-Perl - and newcomers are more than welcome. The monthly meets tend to be bigger than the other ad hoc meetings that take place at other times, and we make sure that they're in easy to get to locations and the pub serves food (meaning that people can eat in the bar if they want to). They normally start around 6.30pm (or whenever people get there after work) and a group tends to be left come closing time. If you're a newcomer or other first timer (even if you've been lurking on the mailing list or on IRC) then please seek Leo out - we have a tradition that the leader of this motley crew buys the new people a drink and introduces them to people. Look forward to seeing you there. -- ilmari A disappointingly low fraction of the human race is, at any given time, on fire. - Stig Sandbeck Mathisen
