Re: [MacPerl] libwww-perl-5.41 now available

[Arved Sandstrom <Arved_37@chebucto.ns.ca>]

On Tue, 22 Dec 1998, Rich Morin wrote:

> IMHO, there are three problems here:
> 
>   *  It isn't as easy as it should be for Mac users to access the CPAN,
>      unpack tar.gz archives, etc.  This needs some technology and/or dox.
> 
I think what we're really saying here is that we don't have one-stop
shopping the way the Unix folks do. For practical purposes, if I know what
module I want from CPAN, I can download it, drag the .tar.gz onto
Expander, and do the MPW build procedure all within 5 minutes, including
XS. This assumes that no porting is needed.

But not everyone has MPW, maybe they have no C compiler at all, and
perhaps they just want to be able to install a non-XS CPAN module with
minimum effort like on Unix. And making things easier for these people is,
IMO, a worthy effort.

>   *  MacPerl wizards aren't pushing their ports back into
the faces of 
>the mainstream (read, Unix) Perl developers.

I'm not sure I understand this. Down the road I think the real target
should be zero requirement for porting. I don't know diddly about what
MacOS X promises, but I thought the whole idea was that a standard Perl
distribution wuld build on OS X.

In the meantime, we port to help ourselves (the Mac community). I can't
see anything going the other way unless it's just plain new stuff, which
is always welcomed by everyone - Unix and otherwise. If any useful
pressure were to be applied, I suspect it ought to be the use of OS-isms
where they're not needed, or their use where they _are_ needed but they're
not well-identified in the code (in other words, are they written to help
porting?)

Maybe you can clarify this point. I'm probably missing something.

> 
>   *  There isn't an easy way for someone to know if a script has been
>      "ported" to MacPerl.  Some sort of flag fields in the indexes?
> 
I guess a combination of a central checklist, and maybe a utility script
which scans other scripts for MacPerl incompatibilities, might be some
ideas (the latter would be non-trivial, I think). Me, I just run 'em, and
see what they do... :-)

> All of these are under our control, where "our" includes MacPerl wizards
> such as Chris and Paul.  We just need to work on it a bit.  Vicki and I
> can help, along the way, by putting up information on the MacPerl Pages.
> 
Agreed. I think some really good topics have been raised in this thread,
and they merit some serious thought.

Arved


***** Want to unsubscribe from this list?
***** Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to mac-perl-request@iis.ee.ethz.ch