On Mar 1, 2012, at 8:59 PM, Mike Alexander wrote: > --On March 1, 2012 9:09:38 AM -0800 John Ralls <[email protected]> wrote: > >> F::Q hasn't published an update to CPAN since October 2009. Paul >> Fenwick has moved the repo to github [1], but hasn't pushed anything >> in a year. >> >> I propose that we fork Fenwick's repo to our Gnucash Github account, >> apply the outstanding patches, and adjust update-finance-quote to >> pull tarballs from there. >> >> Mike, you seem conversant with the F::Q code, are you up for >> maintaining the GC fork? >> >> As an aside, longer term it would be good to come up with a quote >> retrieval mechanism that doesn't pull in an extra scripting >> dependency and has something a bit more robust than screen scraping >> for data retrieval. > > Sure, I can maintain F::Q, but I don't have a Windows machine so I can't do > much with packaging it for Windows. I also can't put the new version up on > CPAN, of course, which means that the installer script for MacOSX and other > Unix variants will have to be changed. If we install it ourselves where do > we put it? I suspect that adding packages to CPAN's directories behind its > back isn't consider entirely kosher. I see that the Windows install script > uses ppm to install it which would have to be changed too. I'm not really up > on Perl all that much, how hard is it to install private packages into an > arbitrary Perl installation? > > Rewriting it would be non-trivial. The whole package is about 11,000 lines > of Perl code (including comments). This includes modules for nearly 50 quote > sources, some of which could probably be skipped, but it's still a fair > amount of code. I also don't think you could entirely avoid screen scraping. > Many of the quote sources don't provide a way to get the data otherwise. > They probably don't encourage that since they want you to see their ads. > > I agree that the current situation is not really tenable, but forking it > isn't quite as easy as it seems at first glance. I don't know what the right > answer is. >
Oh. Sorry, I thought since you were submitting patches you were conversant with Perl. It's trivial to add modules to Perl, and CPAN "owns" only the ~/.cpan directory used for building modules downloaded from CPAN. All of the actual work is done by a Perl module called MakeMaker [1], and installation can either go to a standard location for modules (/usr/local/share/perl/VERSION on my Debian system, /Library/Perl/VERSION on Macs, where VERSION expands to e.g. 5.10.0) or somewhere else and somewhere else gets added to @INC. The M$Win is tied to ActiveState; I don't know how they do things or how to make a ppm,. Regards, John Ralls _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
