> How is it less secure than downloading a tar file and typing
> ./configure?
It's not, I suppose, but it's annoying in a unixy kind of way. I used to
think it was really cool the way you could chain lots of little unixy
programs together, but I increasingly see it as a rather hackish peculiarity
of unix as opposed to a design strength. And it seems more hackish with each
passing year. This kind of stuff is groovy for sysadmin and local automation
but I don't like it in widely distributed stuff. As languages go, sh sucks
big time - the fact that (only slightly different) implementations of exist
on all Unix systems doesn't strike me as a good reason for doing everything
in it.
CPAN.pm strikes me as a good way of doing things. Its interfaces are
programmatic not OS dependant, its scriptability is programmatic not OS
dependant, and it works pretty well (apart from occasionally trying to
upgrade your copy of Perl for you).
