Hi All, Peter pointed out my mailing list fetish at the last meet. Now I've got a bit of a Wiki fetish as well ;)
I've started Phil working on moving all the B&B PM stuff over to TWiki so we can all have a stab at keeping it up to date and adding content. PerlPortal.com will hopefully be ready in a week or two and I'll be harassing you all to at least get a login. That way you can add it if you ever feel the need :) PerlCert.com, PerlCertifiedHosting.com and PerlProject.org will also be getting their own Wikis, so the people on those lists can start contributing to those projects as well. And finally... Drum roll please.... ... .. . PerlSI has been born! Well the concept anyway. Any of you who read my CPAN Project, this has now grown into the "Perl Scriptable Installer", or PerlSI for short. They say that "PerlSI will deliver what PAR always promised, but never quite achieved". By they I mean he... By he I mean me :) Imagine a world where Perl scripts were are lot quicker and easier to install than PHP ones. Where SocialText could be installed in minutes rather than weeks, where it didn't matter what CPAN modules your cheap hosting account had installed. That's PerlSI. Cross Platform Command line or GUI interface Doesn't just install your software and CPAN dependencies, but installs and configures supporting software as well. Examples for installing a Perl CGI application: On a dedicated server without a webserver or Perl installed: PerlSI installs and configures Apache and Perl, then installs your application. On a dedicated server with a webserver but no Perl installed: PerlSI installs and configures Perl with your webserver, then installs your application. On a dedicated server with a webserver and Perl installed: PerlSI installs your application and configures your webserver. On shared hosting with Perl: PerlSI installs your app and any dependent CPAN modules even if they are XS, tests and set's .htaccess if needed and possible. On shared hosting without Perl: PerlSI can't help, no one is perfect. Although the hosting only cost you $5 so I'm sure you could find another cheap one with Perl anyway :P Will PerlSI replace PAR? No PerlSI will use PAR as well as CPANPLUS and PPM. What will the GUI be? Probably still XUL through XULRunner, but potentially Tk Perl Scriptable? A slimmed down Perl interpreter will be a part of the install. If you've ever tried using something like the 'Nullsoft Scriptable Installer System', NSIS, and found yourself wishing it were Perl code and not their low level scripting, that's basically what PerlSI will be. Perl with a load of useful CPAN modules (SSH, Net::FTP, LWP) packaged up with PAR and a nice looking gooey. A PerlSI OO library will probably be built up for basic installer stuff, but you'll always have the options of writing your own Perl code :) When is it going to be ready? Probably gonna take ages. Will it ever be done? Yes, I need it for my own software so it'll get made even if I have to do it all myself. If you need it why start it as an open project? This will help a lot of companies and the spread of Perl, it's always nice to give something to the community. This post is a bit long and weird, have you been drinking again? No I haven't, must the relief of not thinking about Socialtext on CentOS any more. Although the thought of being at this point 3 weeks ago is pretty frustrating. Lyle _______________________________________________ BristolBathPM mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.bristolbath.org/mailman/listinfo/bristolbathpm
