On 11/14/2016 07:39 PM, Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote:
* Todd Rinaldo <to...@cpanel.net> [2016-11-14 15:12]:
Long Term
We need to fix the CPAN modules themselves.
I’m afraid that’s a pipe dream. You can fix the most popular part of
CPAN but not even close to everything. There are still distributions
containing broken Module::Install versions, years after the last
bugfixes. Any solution that sets out from “we fix everything on CPAN”
as a starting point is no solution at all.
So the reality is this: if we make a change that makes most of CPAN non-
installable then a quite significant fraction of it will be left behind
and will never work again.
Before we polarize ourselves into the camps of "we have to fix all of
CPAN" and "it's hopeless to try to fix CPAN", it's important to realize
that we now have the conceptual tools with which to assess the scope of
the problem.
We now know that we can visualize CPAN as a river of dependencies. If
we can identify a critical part of the "upstream", we can set up a
CPANtesters-like apparatus to see how much damage (flooding?)
default_inc_excludes_dot will actually cause. Discussion of courses of
action will then be empirically informed.
This change is, after all, just a much larger version of the "blead
breaks CPAN" problem we've been handling for years.
Thank you very much.
Jim Keenan
