On 10/30/06, Andreas J. Koenig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>>>> On Tue, 31 Oct 2006 00:23:09 +0200, "Gabor Szabo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
said:
> The mapping of flag to Module-Version pairs could actually reside on any
> server with ftp or http access. CPAN.pm would be configured to use such
> a URL.
What you describe can be done with CPAN.pm since the very early days,
but never was it deployed widely. It's called bundle mechanism and the
point of bundles is that they can reference modules, distributions and
recursively bundles again. By including distributions with their CPAN
path you freeze not only the version number but the exact file to be
used.
It's interesting to compare this to what Task distributions do. At
their most basic, Task distributions specify a minimum version of
dependencies to be installed. (Yes, with Module::Install or
Module::Build, the dependency logic can be more intricate, but it's
not clear how widely supported those are.)
Bundle gives the option of either freezing a particular version (by
specifying a distribution file) or else fully upgrading to the
absolute latest version (by specifying a module).
Each has some positives and each has negatives, but it seems to me
that the underlying problem is the lack of a common way to specify
dependency versions in a more granular way.
David
