The only thing that concerns me is that the distribution is growing in size
quite rapidly, and once things are in it's difficult to take them out. Is
anyone concerned if the binary distribution doubles in size? How about if
it trebles in size?
I guess the real question is how do we decide what's in the core and what's
not. Should we start separate distributions for some modules instead of
having one large distribution?
Personally I wouldn't mind if the binary distribution increased by 10 times
- even then it would still be small compared to some toolkits!:) As long as
the runtime sizes are kept the same (i.e., we're not loading modules if they
aren't being used) and the exe generators (PAR, perl2exe & perlapp) don't
automatically include them - then there really isn't any issue other than
bandwidth.
There are other advantages of bundling them together - there is some shared
code which could be removed, with other code simplified. Going forward, all
these modules need to brought together anyway so we can support the NEM,
improved class logic (via UserData type methods), Unicode and no doubt other
things too:) We could always assume that the user will have these modules
installed. Your win32-gui "widget" script for example, would show Perl code
via Scintilla and link to the documentation (locally or on the web) via
AxWindow (click on a method in the Scintilla window, and the documentation
is shown).
Cheers,
jez.
