On Mon, 17 May 2004, Lars Thegler wrote: > I fully appreciate the woes of people forced to work on > Win32, but please - PLEASE - do not clutter CPAN with > distribution packages for specific operating systems. CPAN > is difficult enough to manage (and use!) without having to > deal with packages for proprietary operating environment. > The horror scenario is that for each of the X-thousand > Perl modules, there will be N different versions, each > with it's slightly different packaging scheme.
I'd agree with that - the use of CPAN in its current form to distribute ppms (and rpms, of which there's also some) isn't the most efficient use of a mirrored network without corresponding installation tools that choose alternative mirror sites. And CPAN staying in the source code business for ease of use and maintainability is a strong argument ... > If there is a need for a central distribution site for > Perl modules packaged for ActiveState's Perl, and > ActiveState themselves decline to supply it, I'm sure > there are enough enthusiastic followers that will be more > than happy to do so instead. This could even be mirrored > across the world, just like CPAN. But please don't let the > rest of the Perl community suffer for it. The time does seem to have come for something akin to CPAN but for binary packages. ActiveState probably has some (legitimate) concerns about hosting packages they didn't build (and check) themselves, but perhaps something outside of ActiveState could be started. -- best regards, randy
