I've been lurking on this list for a while now, and it's well past time I contributed my own rant about hateful software.
My day job as a CS grad student has me looking into NLP software. On Wednesday I found an interesting-looking module on CPAN called Lingua::LinkParser which seemed to do more or less what I was looking for, so I figured I'd download it and give it a try. It requires some libraries from CMU, but the site appeared to be down all day. Luckily it was back up yesterday and I was able to download it to take a look. Hate #1 -- the Makefile doesn't have an install target. Hate #2 -- it doesn't create any libraries. It just leaves a bunch of .o files under obj/. But I was happy to see that someone's taken the time to package it up for Debian, so I gave that a try today on a different box. It installed just fine. Now it was time to try out the Perl module. I expanded the tarball and ran "perl Makefile.PL". The first thing it did was ask me to Enter the path to your Link Parser distribution directory: It assumes you've been lazy and just kept everything in the directory that was created when you expanded the Link Parser tarball. Headers, objects, and data all need to be under the same top-level directory. Debian, of course, puts the headers under /usr/include, the objects under /usr/lib, and the data under /usr/share. And of course the Link Parser site was down again most of today. Hate. Walt
