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

[Vicki Brown <vlb@cfcl.com>]

At 10:57 -0800 12/22/98, Chris Nandor wrote:
> 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.

Sorry; I guess I misinterpreted Paul's note:

> Modules for MacPerl users should be distributed in a Mac format.  I
> use .sit.hqx, so that the whole thing can just be unpacked into a
> folder and used.  The two acceptable formats on PAUSE are gzip and
> zip,

This looked like "they don't let me send them .sit.hqx" to me...

> >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.  :)

Now who's getting carried away?  :-)

I don't see what proprietary formats have to do, directly, with posting to
CPAN.
And there is lots of free software on the Mac; not lots of Open Source
software but that's not the point either.

I only blame "us" when "we" fight back by giving in; when we won't put
things in the well-known places. Then I say we are just making the problem
worse.

> 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.

This is true.  But again, it's not a good reason to say we won't play.  We
could be, um, creative?

And I didn't start this by talking about CPAN.pm. I started it by talking
about CPAN the archive. If this has morphed into an _ease of installation_
discussion, that is another matter altogether. My discussion was "put
things into the standard well-known places".  That's all it was (and is).

>
> 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.  :)

In the meantime, I would like to see more of "I placed it on CPAN" and less
"Not a chance".  I'm tired of people downloading things from CPAN as they
are told to do, finding something doesn't "just work", then asking on the
list and being told "Oh, you should have gotten that from Fred's private
directory somewhere on pobox..."

sigh.

I'm outta here for a while.

- V.
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