On Oct 12, 2007, at 3:44 AM, Johan Vromans wrote:
Personally, I have to reject many potential useful CPAN modules because they use a plethora of other modules that most of the time are not even related to the problem at hand.
I find that annoying too. Usually I just bite the bullet and install ten zillion modules though.
For example: I need functionality A. CPAN module Foo implements A, but also B. For B, it needs 891 other CPAN modules, with their dependencies. In this case, I try to isolate the A functionality and copy it to my own code.
Rather than doing that, it would be good to encourage Foo's author to split out A as a separate module. If they're not interested, most licenses would permit you to do that yourself.
An associated issue (that has been raised here before) is related to modules that need a whole bunch of CPAN modules just for building and testing.
That's why we created the 'build_requires' dependency type, but certainly a lot of distributions don't use it yet. And MakeMaker remains unaware of it.
-Ken
