On Nov 21, 2005, at 10:51 AM, Christopher Hicks wrote:
On Sun, 20 Nov 2005, Andreas J. Koenig wrote:
I don't think many people would appreciate getting something
installed they didn't explicitly ask for.
Hmmm. I can have extra pain every time I'm installing something to
avoid occassionally getting something I don't want or I can have
pain every thousandth time I install something because oopsie I got
something extra. It doesn't seem like a hard choice to me. Let's
just say your many people aren't the same folks as my any people. ;-)
The lack of distname support due to anal retentive accident
avoidance in CPAN is utterly odd considering the culture of DWIMery
that is so much a part of Perl. I'm not surprised that one person
would think this was good, but the whole Perl community acquiescing
to it is quite a shock.
Chris,
If CPAN made it easy to install unintended software by mistake, that
would be a huge security hole. Some people run cpan as root.
Defensive programming is absolutely the right thing here.
Chris
--
Chris Dolan, Software Developer, Clotho Advanced Media Inc.
608-294-7900, fax 294-7025, 1435 E Main St, Madison WI 53703
Clotho Advanced Media, Inc. - Creators of MediaLandscape Software
(http://www.media-landscape.com/) and partners in the revolutionary
Croquet project (http://www.opencroquet.org/)
