[MacPerl] MacCPAN Comments

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

I had a useful conversation with Paul Schinder, and for my part I think I
have a handle on where things are going and why. There seems to be a
general consensus that Chris Nandor is going to be doing the lion's share
of actual coding on this stuff, even if he doesn't know it yet, but for
what it's worth if there's anything that someone thinks I can usefully
take a look at just let me know. I _will_ be doing my own little
explorations over the holidays, though.

Not to state anything that isn't known to others, but we really have 2
marks to aim for when setting up a module installer - not just CPAN.pm on
Unix, but also PPM (Perl Package Manager) with ActiveState Perl. I had
gotten disillusioned with earlier ActiveState's (hey, I _have_ to use
Windows at work! Might as well have Perl on the machines.), and so I went
back to the binary distribution based on 5.004.

But this morning, as a result of this thread, I spent less than 20 minutes
downloading and installing ActiveState Build508 (a 5.00502 Perl), and
*also* querying the ActiveState package repository, and using PPM to
download and install 3 non-XS packages (I only have CW on the particular
machine, and PPM looks to build with VC++ or the like), *and* run a few
test scripts (just extracting the Synopsis, usually).

A lot of credit has to go to the ActiveState people for getting a system
like this up and functional on an OS like Windows. In any case, not to get
into OS zealotry, but it's what PPM is doing that is really close to what
I think we want to see for MacCPAN. A searchable repository, and a
one-shot install. As a default PPM uses C:\WINDOWS\TEMP to build in, and
then installs into site_perl.

If we can use the existing ExtUtils stuff with a minimum of hacking, as I
believe the intention is, and duplicate the functionality and ease of use
of PPM with a slightly better (dialog-driven) simple GUI, I think we'd
have a really nice piece of gear.

I'm using ActiveState PPM as a target because it's running on what is
really our competitor OS, another GUI OS. As far as Unix Perl, that's
always going to be my personal favourite. But we really do better
comparing what's being done on Mac to the state of the art on Windows.
IMHO.

As an aside, PPM has no support for testing per se. I think, personally,
that maybe we ought not tear our hair out trying to support this too much,
either. As Paul pointed out, the tests *themselves* may need to be ported,
but more to the point, just as with the ActiveState repository, I figure
that packages accessible with the MacCPAN mechanism will already have
been vetted.

I guess the other thing to mention is that while I had no time to really
esearch it, the ActiveState packages are really closer in spirit to Linux
RPM's than they are to pure Perl dists, since they may include DLLs. But
again this would suit our purposes, too - people with the capability do
the XS builds, a Macpackage gets stored on MacCPAN, and away you go. But
this may be phase 2. :-)

This is a whole hodge-podge, but I figured it might be useful to throw it
all out there. Happy holidays! Arved



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