[MacPerl] Mac CPAN (was: libwww-perl-5.41 now available)

[Vicki Brown <vlb@cfcl.com>]

At 19:10 -0800 12/21/98, Chris Nandor wrote:
> At 21.05 -0500 1998.12.21, Vicki Brown wrote:
> >> The two acceptable formats on PAUSE are gzip and zip,
> >
> >and both of these are readily unpackable on a Mac if one has StuffIt
> >Expander enhanced with DropStuff w/ EE or Stuffit Deluxe.
>
> Both are pay products (DropStuff w/ EE is shareware).  There are free
>ones,
> but they are not as easy to use.  Well, MacGzip is not bad, but still a
>bit
> more complicated and more dangerous.  suntar is significantly less nice to
> use.

True.

But is this a good enough reason not to put at least a _copy_ of everything
on the CPAN?  I don't think so.

Perhaps we need some evangelism with the CPAN archivists.  For example, why
is .sit format disallowed for _MacPerl_ ports?  Seems shortsighted to me...

But then comes the discussion of why there are MacPerl ports, and why the
module owners don't just roll in the appropriate changes and do portable
modules (where portable means works not "can be ported".)  How much of this
is a technical issue and how much is evangelism?

I sure hate to see M$ Windoze getting so much airtime (CPAN time) and we're
relegated off to a little sandbox because we don't wanna do zip and we
don't wanna do .tar.gz and they don't wanna take back our changes. sheesh.

Paul said:
> CPAN is marvelous... for Unix users.

Chris said:
> I think you'll agree that CPAN is not, either (for Mac users).

Oh, I do agree. I think this is something of a self-fullfilling prohpecy,
however. The CPAN is not hospitable to Macs, so we don't put Mac stuff on
the CPAN. And _look_! There isn't any Mac stuff on the CPAN!  See how
inhospitable it is! We were so right not to put things there... :-(

Am I getting carried away?  Is this _not_ what we are doing? However
inadvertently or well-meaningly?

>
> My personal opinion is that by making modules everyone is recommended to
> have and distributing it in only .tar.gz format, it forces them to get
>used
> to tar and gzip (and newline issues, since they are stored in the tar
>files
> with Unix newlines), which helps alleviate the problem in the long run.
>>:)

A great idea. More modules.  Perhaps they will be on the CPAN :-} ;-}

>   [Note: pobox is not an ISP, in the common sense.]

True, but what it is still isn't mirrored in Germany.

>
> We also need a nice PerlInstall program, and Matthias has started one that
> I use regularly.
>
> So maybe we using Compress::Zlib and Archive::Tar and PerlInstall, we can
> have a nice, automated install process for Mac users.  Maybe even combine
> it with LWP and download stuff right from CPAN.  No need for CPAN.pm:
>bring
> up a dialog box, type in the module name, and let MacPerl do the work.  I
> have most of the pieces of code needed to do this now (but not all -- the
> biggest problem is the makefile stuff, which is really a pain in the
>neck).

I'll be happy :-)
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