On Thursday 28 May 2009 4:22:00 pm Larry Wall wrote: > I support the notion of distributing binaries because nobody's gonna > want to chew up their phone's battery doing unnecessary compiles. The > ecology of computing devices is different from ten years ago. I agree. My ideal situation would be that CPAN6 offers multiple 'heads' - one might be a raw metadata store; another might be a Debian/Ubuntu style PPA provider, possibly building (.deb|.rpm)s when uploaded, or in a distributed CPANTS-like fashion.
> Most of these package managers have ways of running an installation > script at the end, so we could perhaps think of this as downloading > an installer rather than the actual software, and the new version > of the installer contains or has access to all the versions it knows > should be installed, and interacts with the official Perl library > installer to install them. This has the potential for greatly angering users and distro packagers: a major reason people use package managers is that they maintain a database of what files were installed, when, and by what package. If you use post-install hooks, many package managers won't have that information, making uninstallation a nightmare. > By the same token, it's smart to keep the metadata close to the thing > it's describing, so if it's easy to extract up front reliably, that's > probably sufficient. Again, agreed. That would fall under the "easy to submit well-formed packages" requirement in my mail. In fact, it could even still be a Meta.yml file in the source distribution - it could be up to CPAN6 to extract it for external access when the distribution is uploaded.
