On Thu, 15 Apr 2010 10:23 -0400, "David Golden" <xda...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 10:14 AM, Tim Bunce <tim.bu...@pobox.com> wrote: > >>On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 09:59:32PM -0400, Jesse Vincent wrote:>> Forcing an > >>extension makes all sorts of tools that previously "just > >> worked" with a tarball suddenly start to fail. > > We've dealt with it in the past. > > However, I'm inclined to think that going that way means an entirely > new client that is designed for .cpan files. This is more akin to > PPM, except non binary. The question in my mind is what this gains us > beyond "double-clickability" for Windows. (Which is a non-trivial > benefit -- e.g. see a *.cpan distribution on a web page, click it to > install in Strawberry Perl). It might let us rethink some of the > painful conventions of distribution tarballs today. > > > It's also the wrong place to encode version information. > > Putting version info in the tarball name was necessary to avoid > duplicate uploads, I suspect. It *is* a terrible place to be encoding > version information, I agree.
(Idea suddenly came to mind. If not workable, just take apart and reassemble until it does work.) Why don't we make the .cpan/.c6pan file (.c6pan) a JSON file, generated by PAUSE once the tarball is uploaded, with whatever information is required (a reference to the tarball, what version of perl is required, etc.) in order, when that file is passed to a CPAN client, to download and install the tarball. I don't see why a "double-clickable" file (or what-have-you equivalent) necessarily has to be the distribution tarball? That way, the tarball can keep its extension... best of both worlds yet? --Curtis -- Curtis Jewell csjew...@cpan.org http://csjewell.dreamwidth.org/ p...@csjewell.fastmail.us http://csjewell.comyr.org/perl/ "Your random numbers are not that random" -- perl-5.10.1.tar.gz/util.c Strawberry Perl for Windows betas: http://strawberryperl.com/beta/
