I need to sleep, but I want to quickly address the small-vs-large packaging, and throw in my most recently found pennies on the matter.
PDL is slowly experiencing a shift from ExtUtils::MakeMaker to Module::Build. I hacked together an extension to Module::Build that sorta gets things done but still needs lots of work. I think that at the moment everybody's waiting for me to finish sorting that sucker out. Once we are in the new install system, we'll probably start putting more direct work into install process. The reason we have a large distribution instead of a bunch of small distributions is because it's what all the users want. Most of our users want something that comes with everything they need. The handful of PDL package maintainers have expressed concerns about increasing the number of packages they must maintain (and all the associated dependency headaches). I believe that PDL may eventually separate into a few large chunks, but nobody wants to take it to a large collection of small distributions on CPAN. And here are my most recent two cents. I have recently started working on writing code for computing clusters that use MPI, a library for coordinating communication amongst many connected computers. PDL is fairly well suited to that sort of programming and we would only need two things to get it to work: (1) an interface to MPI, which already exists on CPAN though it may need some dusting-off, and (2) an easy install for the cluster maintainers. So, it seems reasonable to me that a good 'base' install would be one for which the installation could be automated for clusters of hundreds of computers. David
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