* James E Keenan <jk...@verizon.net> [2016-11-15 14:12]: > 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.
Speaking of empirical facts: broken Module::Install versions are still bundled now. Why is it polarising to point to factual evidence of what we can and cannot expect to happen? > We now know that we can visualize CPAN as a river of dependencies. That covers the CPAN – under the best of cases. I would hope that Perl has ambitions to serve actual users rather than just people publishing libraries for it. > 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. Sounds good in theory. It *would* be great if we had that. But are you building it or at least planning to – or at the very least working to convince someone specific to do so? Because experience says otherwise it’s not getting built. And when it comes to results rather than aspirations, it makes no sense to consider solutions that can be counted on to happen on a par with ones that cannot. I’m not arguing against what you said. Those are great things to want. I am only arguing against it being an argument against what I said. The things you propose are far less likely than the ones I am interested in, but ideally of course we would have both. Personally I wish to prioritise the likely because we cannot afford to end up with no solution. Considering blue-sky solutions on a par with ones that are within reach is not very helpful to that end, even if the blue-sky stuff is necessary to the long term. > Discussion of courses of action will then be empirically informed. Broken Module::Install bundles (and the track record of services not getting built merely by calling for them) are empirically confirmed. What bar does an empirical fact have to clear before it attains the power to affect the decision-making process? > This change is, after all, just a much larger version of the "blead > breaks CPAN" problem we've been handling for years. But not well. Something is better than nothing here, but I think we feel too great about doing a bit and punting on anything more difficult just because most other communities barely even try addressing this at all. With this particular change we’re in a different quantitative breakage league than usually. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
