> I know that Rakudo is not the official implementation. The problem is > that you misunderstood my post. I did not say to distribute PIR to the > exclusion of Perl source. You know that I was replying to Larry's > comment that he supported the notion of distributing binaries. Surely > you didn't think that Larry meant "distribute binaries to the exclusion > of Perl source", did you? Therefore, my comment is a reply to the binary > aspect and the central part of my comment is the problem with modules > that require a C compiler. Sorry about that then.
> > * Collision detection - It becomes impossible to prevent another package > > from overwriting a file installed this way > > Nothing is impossible. The first method that crossed your mind may not > do it, but that doesn't mean that it can't be done. In any case, the > drawbacks are no worse than what the current CPAN shell does today. And > the current CPAN shell obviously work fairly well. The current system > has room for improvement, but any argument that says "it can't work" is > flawed because it is working right this minute and it has been working > for years. It may not be impossible, but the only way to achieve that without making ebuilds and letting the package manager handle the package directly (on Gentoo at least) seem to be limited to "Support the (non-standardized) VDB database for installed packages internally". Which is a pretty shitty road to go down. Also, the Gentoo developers have flat-out declared that they will not officially support modules installed with the CPAN shell because of these issues, so the CPAN shell actually _doesn't_ work "fairly well" on Gentoo. It gives you an environment where your install is considered to be out of the control of the package manager and, therefore, a spaghetti mess where you have multiple package managers which overlap and interfere with each other, yet don't have any mechanism for cooperation, synchronization, or communication.
