demerphq wrote: > On 4/4/06, Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > (*) Yes, I know that the core Perl distribution includes many modules, > > but ask any P5Porter and he'll answer you that the core is over-crowed > > and that all core modules that can be made dual-life should be released > > on the CPAN. > > I dont agree with this. Or rather, I dont agree that the core is > over-crowded. I do agree that as many modules should be dual-lifed as > possible however, but that is just so you can upgrade without > upgrading perl.
Yes, and if some of these modules can be made to work on older Perl as well with one- or two-lines patches, isn't it even better? :-) > Personally i think the "core is too big" argument is a red-herring > given that bandwidth is as cheap as it is these days. Adding a couple > of modules to core would increase the rsynch time by what a second or > two? It would suck up a couple of extra K, something like 1% of what > most of use for our web-browser cache. So the size argument IMO doesnt > hold water. I don't think that the problem of "core is too big" is a matter of disk size, but more a matter of number of modules. P5Porters time is a scarce ressource, and they already lack the time to do all the work they'd like to do just on the interpreter. Making core modules dual-life is a way to handle these to someone else who has spare time and who doesn't need to have deep XS or Perl guts knowledge. At least I think that's the reason, otherwise why was I accepted as the maintainer of two such modules (XSLoader and Sys::Syslog)? > Also, there is a tension in the community relating to this issue that > i dont think we will see any resolution of soon. > > Many module authors set a design objective of making their modules > "dependent only on core modules". This is a comment that I see on a > regular basis. When I hear or read that, I always wonder if the author realised that "core modules" is something dependant on the Perl distribution version. For example a module as important as Test::More was included in the core in 5.7, which really means 5.8. Maybe the problem is that, like Abigail pointed it in P5P, there were fewer Perl releases in the past years, and more precisely we're at the same branches (5.8 / 5.9) since a long time, therefore reducing the cycle of potential inclusion of new modules. > IMO this objecitve is in direct contradiction of the purported P5P > objective of not adding stuff to the core and just makes omissions > from the core even more critical. > > Anyway, i just wanted to add this because I dont think that you can > take it for granted that all perl5porters believe the core module set > should be as restricted as possible. I dont. I believe that the core > should contain out of the box enough support for the various platforms > that perl runs on that when people write code based only on core > modules they can do a good job without reinventing wheels or code > duplication. In a sense, my opinion does not really matter here: the facts are that many P5Porters in general, and the Pumpkings in particular, dislike adding new modules to the core, on the basis that installing modules from the CPAN is easy. You're more active on P5P than I am, so I don't have to recall you all the discussions that preceded the inclusion of CPANPLUS and Module::Build, and how making them work everywhere doesn't look an easy task. But note that I don't necessarily disagree with you: I would welcome a Perl distribution that offer more modules, but when I need to write a portable program, that must run on older Perl, the new features in the core can't be used anyway. -- Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni Close the world, txEn eht nepO.
