Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes wrote: > > Fair enough. I'll add this to the the git post-install script. > > Not sure that's a good idea, since "cpan String::ShellQuote" will > fetch files from the internet (are there other post-installs that do > this?). Also, if cpan has never been used before, it will go into > a lengthy configuration dialog to set up CPAN::Config.
Yes, this is a definite no-no as postinstall scripts cannot be interactive. I believe in times past they had a console allocated, but now they don't even have that so a user cannot read any output nor provide input to a running postinstall, and running CPAN the first time requires answering a slew of questions. Plus, it's not safe to assume that the computer is connected to the internet when running a postinstall, since many people do the package download step on one machine and then install that on a different machine that's not connected to the net, or connected through a slow connection. I think it would be sufficient to say in the package README that certain perl modules are required. If this is a package meant for developers then I don't think it's too much to ask them to read the docs and run a cpan command if they don't have a module. Brian
