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

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

At 13.23 -0500 1998.12.22, Vicki Brown wrote:
>Perhaps we need some evangelism with the CPAN archivists.  For example, why
>is .sit format disallowed for _MacPerl_ ports?  Seems shortsighted to me...

It is not disallowed.  But if you use it, it cannot be indexed as per the
normal automatic indexing and cataloguing, etc., because .sit is
proprietary and there is no Unix software that can decode it.  For "ports"
of existing stuff, this is not as much of a problem.  You are allowed to
put anything you want in your own authors directory.


>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?

You are getting carried away.  We cannot really blame the CPAN people much.
Blame the community of Mac users that has standardized on proprietary
formats and doesn't encourage free software.  Blame the MacPerl community
that has not yet provided tools to deal with this.  But don't blame our
community too much, because we are working on it.  :)

The one piece of blame that belongs with the CPAN people is that CPAN.pm
relies too much on shells and forking and stuff that is not very portable
to non-Unix systems.  But we can get around that somewhat.

When I get some tuits, I'll do more work on this.  Don't expect to see a
full release of such a thing for awhile.  It might be a part of the 5.005
release of MacPerl, or something.  Maybe we'll use the existing CPAN.pm and
modify it for MacPerl usage.  I dunno, we'll see.  MakeMaker is going to
need some work, too.  It's a big job.  :)

--
Chris Nandor          mailto:pudge@pobox.com         http://pudge.net/
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